Civil rights, jurisprudence, advocacy, the work of expanding rights and protections.
In 1972 Gisèle Halimi won acquittal for a 16-year-old rape victim prosecuted for having an abortion, and in doing so helped bring down the law that had made her a criminal.
Read the full story →In 1933 Hannah Arendt secretly gathered evidence of Nazi antisemitism for the Zionist Federation of Germany. The Gestapo jailed her for eight days but could not read her coded notes.
Read the full story →Hannah Arendt's chapter on the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man, drawn from her own statelessness, has been called the most widely read essay on refugees ever.
Read the full story →Heinrich Heine's 1823 line that where books are burned, people will in the end be burned too, is displayed at Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Read the full story →Heinrich Heine's 1844 poem "Die schlesischen Weber" (The Silesian Weavers), based on a weavers' uprising, became his most popular political poem.
Read the full story →Hersch Lauterpacht recommended the charges 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' used at Nuremberg, putting the protection of individuals at the heart of international law.
Read the full story →In 1929 Hersch Lauterpacht and Arnold McNair started the Annual Digest of International Law Cases, now the International Law Reports, an essential resource running to dozens of volumes.
Read the full story →For 25 years Hersch Lauterpacht edited Oppenheim's International Law so thoroughly that it became known in legal circles as Lauterpacht's Oppenheim.
Read the full story →English Heritage notes that Hersch Lauterpacht's 1945 book An International Bill of the Rights of Man helped form the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention.
Read the full story →As a member of the UN International Law Commission in the early 1950s, Hersch Lauterpacht served as its special rapporteur on the law of treaties.
Read the full story →J. D. Salinger used his French and German as an army counterintelligence agent, interrogating prisoners of war and later serving on denazification duty in Germany.
Read the full story →In Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969), Jack Greenberg won a Supreme Court order that segregated school systems must end at once.
Read the full story →At 27, Jack Greenberg was the youngest lawyer on the team that won Brown v. Board of Education; he went on to argue 40 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court.
Read the full story →Jack Greenberg's book Crusaders in the Courts tells how a dedicated band of lawyers fought the civil rights revolution, and is regarded as the definitive history of the Legal Defense Fund.
Read the full story →Jack Greenberg argued Furman v. Georgia (1972), in which the Supreme Court held that the death penalty as then applied was cruel and unusual punishment.
Read the full story →In Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), Jack Greenberg's Legal Defense Fund won a ruling barring employers from relying on tests with a discriminatory impact.
Read the full story →In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. asked Jack Greenberg and the Legal Defense Fund to handle all demonstration cases involving the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Read the full story →Jack Greenberg argued Meredith v. Fair, the case that led to James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi, a first step in integrating the university.
Read the full story →Serving in the US Navy in World War II, Jack Greenberg risked a court-martial by shouting at a superior officer in defense of a Black crewman he felt was mistreated.
Read the full story →On 17 April 1933 James Franck, exempt as a war veteran, resigned his Göttingen chair in protest, the first German academic to do so over the Nazi civil service law.
Read the full story →On 11 June 1945 the Franck Report urged that the atomic bomb be demonstrated in an uninhabited place rather than used on Japanese cities without warning.
Read the full story →In 1910 Joel Spingarn read of a Black tenant farmer in Arkansas tortured to force a confession, gave $100 to his defense fund, and soon joined the NAACP.
Read the full story →Joel Spingarn, a Jewish literary scholar, led the NAACP for decades and in 1914 created the Spingarn Medal for Black achievement, still awarded today.
Read the full story →In 1913 Joel Spingarn began a campaign he called the New Abolition, reviving the spirit of the abolitionists and spreading the NAACP to new cities.
Read the full story →In 1910 Joel Spingarn offered a faculty resolution supporting a Columbia professor summarily dismissed by the university's president, and was himself dismissed weeks later.
Read the full story →In 1911 Joel Spingarn accompanied Black men to a New York theater that refused them tickets, then helped the NAACP's Vigilance Committee win a lawsuit against the management.
Read the full story →Charged with 'social parasitism' in 1964, Joseph Brodsky defended his right to be a poet, and a smuggled transcript made him a symbol of free art.
Read the full story →Joseph Roth warned against fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and, after 1933, wrote fiercely anti-fascist articles from exile in Paris.
Read the full story →As student council president at Amherst, Joseph Stiglitz joined the March on Washington and organised an exchange with a small African-American college in the South.
Read the full story →In April 1977 Judith Heumann helped lead a sit-in of about 150 disabled people in a San Francisco federal building that lasted almost a month and forced the government to sign the rules enforcing Section 504, the federal law barring discrimination against people with disabilities in federally funded programs.
Read the full story →In 1983 Judith Heumann, Ed Roberts and Joan Leon founded the World Institute on Disability, one of the first global disability rights organizations founded and led by disabled people, which still helps people with disabilities find work, benefits and safety.
Read the full story →Julius Rosenwald gave several thousand dollars to help establish the NAACP and found a venue for its 1912 Chicago meeting, at his own synagogue, Temple Sinai.
Read the full story →In July 1945 Leo Szilard drafted a petition, signed by about 70 Manhattan Project scientists, urging President Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without warning.
Read the full story →Leonard Bernstein gave benefit concerts for Amnesty International in Munich in 1976 and Berlin in 1979, and set up a fund in his wife's name to aid human rights activists.
Read the full story →Lillian Wald brought nursing into the homes of New York's immigrant poor, coined the term 'public health nurse' and started America's first public school nursing programme in 1902.
Read the full story →Louis Brandeis, known as "the People's Lawyer", became the first Jewish US Supreme Court justice in 1916 and wrote some of the greatest defences of free speech and privacy.
Read the full story →From 1907 Louis Brandeis fought unpaid for nine years to stop J. P. Morgan's New Haven Railroad monopolising New England's railways, and his warnings proved right.
Read the full story →Louis Brandeis's 1928 dissent against warrantless wiretapping in Olmstead v. United States was vindicated in 1967, when the Supreme Court overturned Olmstead in Katz v. United States.
Read the full story →After finding that most low-wage workers' life insurance policies lapsed unpaid, Louis Brandeis created Massachusetts savings bank life insurance, signed into law in 1907.
Read the full story →In a 1913 Harper's Weekly article Louis Brandeis wrote that "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants", a line that still defines the case for open government.
Read the full story →Louis Brandeis's 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California has been praised as perhaps the greatest defence of free speech ever written by a Supreme Court justice.
Read the full story →Marcel Proust was among the first to defend Alfred Dreyfus, attending Zola's trial and persuading Anatole France to sign the petition for him.
Read the full story →In January 1964 Michael Schwerner became the first white civil rights worker based permanently outside Jackson, Mississippi, working for CORE in Meridian for $9.80 a week.
Read the full story →In 1963 Michael Schwerner took part in the campaign to desegregate Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Maryland, which had kept a whites-only admissions policy for decades.
Read the full story →As a student at Cornell, Michael Schwerner campaigned successfully for his fraternity to accept a Black student as a pledge, an early sign of his commitment to equality.
Read the full story →In Meridian, Michael Schwerner organised a boycott of a variety store that sold mostly to Black customers until it hired its first African American employee.
Read the full story →On Memorial Day 1964 Michael Schwerner and James Chaney asked Mount Zion church in Longdale, Mississippi, to host a Freedom School and urged its members to register to vote.
Read the full story →National outrage at the 1964 killing of Michael Schwerner and fellow activists James Chaney and Andrew Goodman helped Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Read the full story →In 1933 Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin and, when arrested, refused to disown it, believing a poet must never renounce his work.
Read the full story →On May 28, 1961, Peter Benenson’s article “The Forgotten Prisoners” in The Observer launched the movement that became Amnesty International.
Read the full story →From 1942 Raphael Lemkin worked for the US War Department in Washington and advised the Board of Economic Warfare, bringing his expertise on Nazi occupation law to the Allied cause.
Read the full story →As a young student, Raphael Lemkin challenged the idea that state sovereignty let governments kill their own people, replying to his professor: "But the Armenians are not chickens."
Read the full story →Raphael Lemkin coined the word 'genocide' in 1944, then campaigned until the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention on 9 December 1948.
Read the full story →After fleeing Poland in 1939, Raphael Lemkin gathered and analysed Nazi decrees in Stockholm's libraries, uncovering a deliberate plan to destroy whole nations.
Read the full story →After the 1948 vote, Raphael Lemkin kept lobbying until the Genocide Convention came into force in 1951, and then helped countries write genocide into their own laws.
Read the full story →Advising US chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson in 1945–1946, Raphael Lemkin succeeded in having the new word "genocide" included in the indictment of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.
Read the full story →Little known when he died in 1959, Raphael Lemkin was rediscovered in the 1990s as international courts began prosecuting genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Read the full story →In 1933, years before the Holocaust, Raphael Lemkin proposed to an international law conference in Madrid that the destruction of groups be made a crime under international law.
Read the full story →René Cassin was vice-president of France's Council of State from 1944 to 1960, chaired the committee preparing the 1958 constitution and sat on the Constitutional Council.
Read the full story →René Cassin used the money from his 1968 Nobel Peace Prize to found the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1969.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”