Civil rights, jurisprudence, advocacy, the work of expanding rights and protections.
When a Princeton hotel refused a room to the Black contralto Marian Anderson in 1937, Albert Einstein invited her to stay at his house. She stayed with him on later visits.
Read the full story →Albert Einstein joined the NAACP, called racism America's worst disease, and in 1946 spoke at Lincoln University, a historically Black college that gave him an honorary degree.
Read the full story →Asked by Oliver Tambo to help when the exiled ANC was mistreating captured enemy agents, Albie Sachs helped draft a code of conduct that committed the movement to no torture and to trials instead of indefinite detention.
Read the full story →In 2005 Justice Albie Sachs wrote the Constitutional Court judgment that made South Africa the fifth country in the world to recognize same-sex marriage.
Read the full story →The fight to free Alfred Dreyfus led to the founding in 1898 of the Ligue des droits de l'homme, which still defends the rights of everyone in France.
Read the full story →Wrongly convicted of treason, Alfred Dreyfus refused to accept a pardon as the end of his case and pressed on until France's highest court cleared him in 1906.
Read the full story →At Yale Law School, Anna Freud worked with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973), a book on children and the law.
Read the full story →Nelson Mandela said he read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much encouragement from it" in his struggle against apartheid.
Read the full story →In 1945 Arthur Miller published Focus, a novel about a gentile mistaken for a Jew, one of the first American novels to confront antisemitism at home.
Read the full story →In 1965 Arthur Miller became the first American president of PEN International, using the role to campaign for imprisoned and persecuted writers.
Read the full story →Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, Arthur Miller refused to identify others; his contempt conviction was overturned in 1958.
Read the full story →Aryeh Neier, who fled Nazi Germany as a two-year-old in 1939, led the ACLU, co-founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 and headed the Open Society Foundations.
Read the full story →Aryeh Neier was involved in creating both the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal and the International Criminal Court, and supported groups that pursue justice for victims.
Read the full story →Aryeh Neier's first ACLU job, in 1963, was strengthening its state branches; he organized new affiliates in Texas and Oklahoma, where the ACLU had none.
Read the full story →As national director of the ACLU from 1970 to 1978, Aryeh Neier helped grow membership from 140,000 to 200,000 and led work on the rights of prisoners and psychiatric patients.
Read the full story →Aryeh Neier co-founded Helsinki Watch in 1978 to press for the release of the Moscow Helsinki Group, whose members had been jailed for monitoring Soviet human rights promises.
Read the full story →Under Aryeh Neier, Human Rights Watch began monitoring violations of the laws of armed conflict, holding governments and guerrillas alike to the Geneva Conventions.
Read the full story →As director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s, Aryeh Neier pressed for civilian review of police and began defending people confined in mental institutions.
Read the full story →A Human Rights Watch researcher working for Aryeh Neier first identified the 1991 killing of more than 200 men taken from Vukovar's hospital, later confirmed by exhumation.
Read the full story →Baruch Blumberg used his 1976 Nobel lecture to warn against shunning virus carriers, and later advised lawyers who won children with hepatitis B the right to attend school.
Read the full story →In February 1946 Beate Sirota, a 22-year-old interpreter on General MacArthur’s staff, drafted the clauses of Japan’s new constitution that guarantee women equality before the law and in marriage, rights that still protect every woman in Japan.
Read the full story →In 2011, aged 91, Ben Ferencz delivered a closing statement in the International Criminal Court's trial of Thomas Lubanga, and hailed his 2012 conviction as a milestone.
Read the full story →After 13 years in private practice, and moved by the Vietnam War, Ben Ferencz quit to campaign full time for an international criminal court and laws against aggression.
Read the full story →Opening his Nuremberg case in 1947, Ben Ferencz said vengeance was not the goal: the case was a plea of humanity to law, a theme that guided the rest of his life.
Read the full story →In 1945 Ben Ferencz joined the US Army's new war crimes branch and entered camps such as Buchenwald and Mauthausen, sometimes within hours of liberation, to secure Nazi records.
Read the full story →From 1985 to 1996 Ben Ferencz was an adjunct professor of international law at Pace University in White Plains, New York, passing on the lessons of Nuremberg.
Read the full story →At 27, in his first case, Ben Ferencz was chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial, then spent decades campaigning for an International Criminal Court.
Read the full story →Told in 1969 that she came on “too strong for a woman,” Bernice Sandler found a legal tool, filed complaints against some 250 universities and helped bring about Title IX, the 1972 law banning sex discrimination in federally funded education.
Read the full story →Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique became an immediate best-seller in 1963, sold well over three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages.
Read the full story →In 1966 Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, writing its name on a napkin in her hotel room, and served as its first president.
Read the full story →In The Fountain of Age (1993), Betty Friedan challenged the view of old age as only decline, arguing that later life can be a time of growth.
Read the full story →Under Betty Friedan's leadership NOW won a 1967 executive order extending affirmative action to women and a 1968 ruling that sex-segregated help-wanted ads were illegal.
Read the full story →In 1957 Betty Friedan surveyed 200 of her Smith College classmates and found many suffering from what she called the problem that has no name.
Read the full story →On August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, Betty Friedan organized a nationwide Women's Strike for Equality and led tens of thousands down Fifth Avenue.
Read the full story →In 1947 Billy Wilder joined the Committee for the First Amendment, which defended Hollywood figures targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Read the full story →In 1945 Billy Wilder returned to Germany with the US Army's psychological warfare unit and supervised the English version of Death Mills, a film documenting the Nazi camps.
Read the full story →In 1975 Bob Dylan released Hurricane, an eight-minute ballad arguing that the imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter was innocent, and performed it at every date of his Rolling Thunder tour.
Read the full story →On 28 August 1963 Bob Dylan sang at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech.
Read the full story →In 1963 and 1964 Bob Dylan wrote songs about the murder of Medgar Evers, the death of barmaid Hattie Carroll and James Meredith's ordeal integrating the University of Mississippi.
Read the full story →In 1937, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Boris Pasternak refused to sign a Writers' Union statement supporting death sentences for Red Army commanders.
Read the full story →Camille Pissarro was convinced of Alfred Dreyfus's innocence by 1897 and in 1898 added his name to the intellectuals' petition backing Émile Zola.
Read the full story →David Ricardo was an abolitionist. In March 1823 he told a meeting of the East India Company’s Court that he regarded slavery as a stain on the nation’s character.
Read the full story →As an MP, David Ricardo voted in 1821 to abolish the death penalty for forgery, backed criminal law reform and sought an inquiry into the Peterloo Massacre.
Read the full story →For most of his working life, Franz Kafka investigated and assessed compensation claims for injured industrial workers at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague.
Read the full story →For the Auschwitz trial Fritz Bauer recruited expert historians whose research became Anatomy of the SS State, the first thorough survey of the SS based on its own records.
Read the full story →Fritz Bauer initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1963–65, in which 319 witnesses, including 181 camp survivors, testified about the crimes of the death camp.
Read the full story →In Swedish exile Fritz Bauer co-founded a periodical with Willy Brandt and in 1945 published Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht, War Criminals in Court.
Read the full story →Fritz Bauer co-founded the Humanist Union, a civil rights group, and argued for a criminal law focused on rehabilitation; a prize in his name honors legal reformers.
Read the full story →In the 1952 Remer trial, prosecutor Fritz Bauer argued that the Nazi state was not a state under the rule of law, and the July 1944 resisters were legally and morally rehabilitated.
Read the full story →Fritz Bauer lectured youth groups on the roots of fascism and backed a Frankfurt student group working against antisemitism and for ties with Israel.
Read the full story →In 1957 German prosecutor Fritz Bauer secretly told Israel where Adolf Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, a crucial lead that resulted in his capture in 1960.
Read the full story →Appointed in 1930, Fritz Bauer was the youngest local judge in the Weimar Republic, and he campaigned publicly to defend the democratic constitution against the Nazis.
Read the full story →Ordered by the Nazis in 1933 to dismiss Jewish employees, Fritz Haber tried to delay their departures until he could find them places, then resigned himself.
Read the full story →Gerda Lerner's 1972 anthology Black Women in White America chronicled 350 years of Black women's contributions and was one of the first books of its kind.
Read the full story →At Sarah Lawrence College Gerda Lerner developed a master's program in women's history, first offered in 1972, the first American graduate degree in the field.
Read the full story →After moving to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1980, Gerda Lerner established the nation's first PhD program in women's history.
Read the full story →Gerda Lerner's 1967 book The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery restored two pioneering abolitionist and women's rights campaigners to history.
Read the full story →In 1979 Gerda Lerner chaired a Sarah Lawrence institute whose participants campaigned for a National Women's History Week, which grew into Women's History Month.
Read the full story →In 1963, while still an undergraduate at the New School, Gerda Lerner taught Great Women in American History, considered the first regular college course in women's history.
Read the full story →By forcing a 1978 gang rape case into France's highest criminal court, Gisèle Halimi sparked the debate that produced the 1980 law defining rape as any sexual penetration by violence, coercion or surprise.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”