At 50th Re-Union in “Occupied D.C.” Graduates of Alternative Law School Ponder. Life, Politics, & “Rule of Law,” Then and Now
Written by SP Editor
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,”
--Donald Trump at a White House press conference, May 5, 2025—
In 1968, a very entitled baby boomer named Donald Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree from its Wharton School of Business. His next stop was the family business, not law school. As indicated by the quote above, that career choice has given our current president—despite being famously litigious-- much plausible deniability when quizzed about legal matters, including his own flagrant violations of the U.S. Constitution.
As the Sixties came to end, some men and women more influenced by campus activism during that era did go to law school. But it wasn’t easy finding one that was not a training ground for future servants of wealthy individuals (like Trump) or corporate America in general.
Fortunately, this was also the era of alternative institutions. Counter-cultural currents had already spawned alternative newspapers (aka the “underground press”), alternative life-styles (in the form of communes and collectives), alternative grocery stores (food co-ops), alternative healthcare providers (women’s clinics) and even (thanks to the current publisher of Social Policy) an alternative labor organization (the United Labor Unions).
In 1971, a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio—politically liberal and reform minded since its inception in 1850—decided to join this trend by launching an alternative law school at a “satellite campus” in Washington, DC.
The Antioch School of Law (ASL) opened its doors in the fall of 1972 to
an unusually diverse, Sixties’ inspired founding class. We arrived just several months after operatives for then-President Richard Nixon planted the seeds for his downfall, a year later, by botching their burglary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) offices located in the Watergate apartment complex.
The 145 students drawn to ASL, some in their 30s and 40s, included not a single Nixon fan or future Federalist Society member. Instead, our first-year class was full of white, African-American, Native American, and Latino veterans of the civil rights, anti-war, and welfare rights movements, various socialist groups, the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and women’s liberation struggles.
About 30 percent of ASL founding class members were female, 33 percent were people of color, and only a third came directly from college. Our ranks included 42-year old Jim Groppi, a famous civil rights priest from Milwaukee; Grace Thorpe, the middle-aged daughter of Olympic athlete Jim and a militant in the American Indian Movement (AIM); Norman Jacques, who lost his seat in the Rhode Island State legislature after refusing induction into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, and Mary Treadwell Barry, a former member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who had become a Black community leader in D.C. and wife of its future mayor, the scandal scarred Marian Barry.
Our collective record of arrests for past misdemeanors, mainly protest related, was impressively long. (Some classmates, like Mary Barry, would have future legal troubles less glorious than their past ones.) Our new law school would soon boast the highest percentage of students belonging to the left-wing National Lawyers Guild (NLG) anywhere in the country at the time.
From Nixon to Trump
A fiftieth re-union of this unusual group--attended by fifty of its surviving members--created a rare opportunity for joint discussion of the state of legal education then and now, the challenges facing lawyers trying to represent workers and the poor in any era, and the similarities and differences between the dark days of the Nixon Administration and mounting threats to civil liberties and democracy under the second coming of Donald Trump.
Among the ASL graduates in attendance were many who once served in legal aid offices around the country or became public defenders and consumer protection specialists, NLRB or immigration attorneys, union staffers for AFSCME, SEIU, CWA, and the Teamsters, or federal prosecutors of Teamster crooks! One re-union organizer was Nancy Shia, the best-known movement photographer in DC over the past fifty years, a longtime neighborhood activist in Adams-Morgan, National Press Club member, and former staffer for the Federal News Service. (Her work illustrates this story.)
Among the former “electeds” at the re-union was the always formidable Katya deKadt, a red diaper baby and longtime NYC socialist who got elected state supreme court judge many years before Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty (with her campaign volunteer help). Another was Sherwood Guernsey, a Dartmouth graduate who served as a pro-labor Democrat in the Massachusetts House for eight years and helped organize other Peace Corps veterans to support the Carter Administration’s 1979 return of the Canal Zone to Panama, where he had spent two years after college.
Guernsey’s path to ASL was typical of the its activist founding class. In 1971, he had just completed his tour of duty in rural Central America. As he told an interviewer years later, he still “wanted to somehow make a difference for people in the world—but I wasn’t sure how.”
His first stop proved to be a career mis-step. Just a few years after Trump graduated from the Wharton School, Guernsey enrolled in an MBA program there, thinking that he could bring a more humane approach to business. “I attended for a term,” says Guernsey, “but I found I didn’t fit in. Every other person but one was talking about going to IBM or GM, and I had just come from a mud hut in Central America.”
He dropped out and worked briefly for a social services agency in Philadelphia before deciding that he could have more future impact as a lawyer than a social worker. But he didn’t want to go to a law school using the traditional method, “where the professor gets up there and throws questions at you about appellate cases where the facts are already settled and demeans you if you don’t have the right answer.”
When Guernsey learned about the planned launch of ASL in 1972, he applied immediately because it “offered a different path” to a law degree. “All the professors were actively practicing attorneys. The plan was to have us assist their work on actual cases, rather than just read and analyze case decisions. This was much better preparation for the real world, where you have to listen to your client, sort out the key information…then analyze how the law applies, and, most importantly, make a recommendation.”
The Legacy of ASL
Members of Antioch’s founding class came together again last Fall at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of District Columbia (UDC).
The UDC, a public, historically black land-grant university in the District, took over ALS after its original sponsor became financially overextended in the mid-1980s.
The UDC law school has carried on Antioch’s legacy by remaining public interest oriented and developing “skills that empower its students to become effective, ethically conscious lawyers…who seek to diversify the profession and provide greater access to legal services.” Plus, its tuition is about $13,000 a year for district residents and $25,000 for non-residents, as compared to an average tab of $45,000 among public law schools nationally and private law school tuition bills that can reach $60,000 a year.
Diversity and affordability are no small accomplishment at a time when, as the NY Times has reported, “the number of Black students entering the nation’s most elite law schools declined” in 2025 and the American Bar Association (ABA) has “recently suspended the use of law school diversity standards in accrediting schools, under pressure from the Trump Administration.”
In recent surveys, the Clarke School of Law has ranked first nationally, among all law schools, for providing “the greatest resources for minority students” and placed the second highest percentage of graduates in government and public interest jobs.” US. News and World Report ranked it 19th in the nation for “best clinical legal training program.”
A half century ago, its predecessor was virtually alone in centering its curriculum on clinical work. ASL students enrolled to gain practical, hands-on experience at its Urban Law Institute (ULI), a “teaching law firm” devoted to providing much-needed legal services to the black community in D.C. That was the constituency of greatest concern to Yale law school graduates Jean and Edgar Cahn, co-founders and co-deans of the school.
When the Cahns welcomed their initial student body, they proudly declared that that ASL would never be “morally neutral” because it was so deeply “committed to those values and lessons we know through centuries of resistance to injustice and arbitrary power.”
Both partners in this (then very rare) inter-racial marriage had previously held high level jobs in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during the Johnson Administration. In the mid-1960s heyday of LBJ’s “Great Society.” the Cahns helped create the OEO Legal Services Program, a pioneering federal initiative to make legal advice and representation more available to low-income people. A few years later, the OEO—now under a Republican administration--provided a $1 million grant to help launch their new law school. In the 1980s, a more right-wing GOP president, Ronald Reagan, cut funding for such programs. To keep the ASL afloat then, the Cahns had to mortgage their own home to help pay faculty salaries.
Alternative Legal Education
Our initial case referrals all came from the Neighborhood Legal Services Program in D.C. and ULI clients formed their own council to ensure accountability by the faculty and students serving them. All founding class members spent their first two weeks in DC living with poor families in the District to better appreciate conditions in long ignored neighborhoods like Anacostia.
The first crop of ASL faculty members included some older professors, with past experience teaching at traditional law schools. But, the Cahns also enlisted younger teachers—like future DC Mayor and Democratic National Committee treasurer Sharon Pratt—who were generational peers of the school’s first students and shared their personal enthusiasm for alternative legal education.
As Leslie Gerwin, a founding class member who later became a law professor herself, points out, ASL was also highly innovative with its graduation requirement of a written thesis. This “emphasized the interdisciplinarity of legal study” and “served as a forerunner for the idea that all students—not just law review members—should have a mentored writing experience.” While many traditional law schools have since adopted such a requirement, the different law school culture of ASL allowed for “considerable creativity,” Gerwin recalls.
As noted earlier (by Sherwood Guernsey), most law school teaching at the time used the very dry academic approach called the “Langdell case method” (developed by a Harvard Law School dean in the late 19th century). Law students spent most of their three-years, before taking a state bar exam, reading already decided appellate cases, in various subject matter areas.
In class, they had to be ready to recite the relevant facts and/or legal finding whenever called upon, at random, by all-powerful professors. And during written tests, they had to regurgitate--via hurried scribbling in little blue covered exam books, after much memorization--key case citations and decisions, with similar accuracy.
Millions of non-law students became familiar with the daily intimidation (and sometimes ritual humiliation) of this “Socratic Method” when a fictional Harvard law school professor named Charles Kingsfield (played by John Houseman) demonstrated its use in a popular 1973 film called The Paper Chase . (Houseman played the same haughty character on a TV sequel that lasted for four seasons).
The Socratic Method Questioned
Being generally older, not great respecters of authority and not studying at Harvard, ASL students immediately balked at any such classroom power games. At one of our first classes on the very boring (but important) subject of Civil Procedure, a bearded, long-haired classmate named Cliff Fulmer-- who later became a left-wing colonizer and union activist at a factory in North Carolina--was called upon by a professor using a class list to find his name.
Brother Cliff politely informed his would-be questioner that he had done the assigned reading. But, when he was ready to contribute to the case discussion, he would signal that by raising his hand. Solidarity from others less conscientious (and thus not well prepared) wasn’t even necessary to make the point that everyone preferred voluntary, as opposed to involuntary, class participation. The left-liberal faculty, to its credit, got the message about calling on hand-raisers first, rather than random targets; all future Socratic exchanges thus became more radically democratic, at least by contemporary law school standards.
Dealing with the imperious Cahns was a different matter. Jean and Edgar had written extensively about ways of making government bureaucracies more responsive to recipients of publicly-funded social services and the need to democratize community organizations of the poor. However, when it came to running their own law school, “maximum feasible participation”—a liberal mantra during that period—was not highly valued, in theory or practice, by the co-founders of ASL. Institutional transparency, leadership accountability, and even group decision making with the faculty were not high on their reform agenda.
Faculty members were initially barred from even gathering without Jean or Edgar present. All important decisions about curriculum, scheduling, and arranging adequate facilities for the school had already been made or, worse yet, not made by the Cahns. One emerging point of contention involved a few NLG members, who were interested in doing labor work, rather than providing services to “minority entrepreneurs,” as one part of the ULI’s projected role as “corporate counsel to the poor.”
A “Majoritarian White Concern”?
These student critics of the Cahns noticed that D.C. was the home of tens of thousands of black workers, in the private sector and federal government. At federal agencies, they were just starting to organize and bargain collectively in large numbers, in the wake of executive orders and Congressional legislation that President Trump tried, illegally, to nullify last year. Nevertheless, the ASL co-deans rejected the idea that defending workers’ rights should be an important part of public interest or poverty law practice because, in their view, all unions were just a “majoritarian white concern.”
Attempts by faculty and/or students to offer constructive criticism of such narrow-mindedness was not well received; several popular attorney/professors soon faced non-renewal of their one -year contracts. When some founding class members tried to organize a student association, their political motives were impugned.
As a tug of war that no one wanted got worse, the co-deans tried (unsuccessfully) to pit minority students against their white classmates. In their whispering campaign against the latter, the Cahns claimed that certain “revolutionary types” -- who had other law school options and should never have been admitted--were now endangering ASL’s provisional accreditation by the American Bar Association (ABA) because of their selfish complaints.
One helper of that unseemly effort was the late Mary Treadwell Barry. She soon dropped out of ASL because of her demanding day job directing Pride, Inc., which provided both jobs for African-American youth and housing management services. In that latter role, she ended up stealing money that should have been spent on improving apartment conditions for low-income tenants. After her conviction, she served time in federal prison; in 1998, she went to jail a second time for embezzling funds from a neighborhood advisory group in Columbia Heights, where ASL was originally located.
An Appeal for Help
By the Spring of 1973, two-thirds of a very discontented student body appealed for the intervention of then Antioch College President James Dixon, Antioch’s board of trustees, and the law school’s own Board of Visitors, which included several prominent corporate Democrats. The resulting very tense show-down meeting and resulting six-week investigation led to some administrative changes and improvements. But, by then, some founding class members, decided not to stick things out; with help from a closet NLG member who was then law school dean at Catholic University, about fifteen defectors transferred there, across town, and a few others to non-DC law schools.
Despite this rocky start, ASL finally obtained full ABA accreditation in 1977. It ultimately avoided the fate of the similarly innovative, diverse, and social justice oriented New College of California School of Law (NCCSL), founded one year after ASL. During its 35-year existence, NCCSL “accepted many non-traditional students, and turned out hundreds if not thousands of progressive attorneys who served the people, not corporate interests,” according to Tenderloin Housing Clinic founder and San Francisco author Randy Shaw. But, in 2008, mounting administrative problems and a financial crisis led to its “tragic demise.”
More recently, the Peoples College of Law—a National Lawyers Guild-backed private law school founded in 1974--closed its doors in Los Angeles, after long offering a part-time, four-year evening program focused on public interest advocacy. It was another Left Coast casualty of “financial, leadership, and accreditation issues.”
Déjà Vu All Over Again?
The national and local political back-drop of the ASL founding class re-union in 2024 was eerily familiar to law school enrollees right before the second national election victory of a corrupt and ruthless conservative Republican. As the NY Times recently reported, in the early 1970s, “a power-hungry president had twisted the federal government into a tool for his political benefit. His aides kept an ‘enemies list’ of opponents to be punished. His cronies ran the Justice Department and he made puppets of other agencies that were meant to be independent. Corporations that wanted favorable treatment from the White House were pressured to make contributions to the president’s political coffers.” (And in Chile then, like Venezuela now, there was even bloodier U.S.-engineered regime change.)
To clear the streets of domestic radicals and law-breakers (including this future law student) just fifteen months before ASL opened its doors. NW, Richard Nixon mobilized nearly twenty thousand local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel, National Guard members, US Marines, paratroopers from the army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment from Fort Meade in Maryland. (This was a much larger, albeit more short-term, occupying force than Trump’s iteration fifty-four years later.)
Working in concert, these men in uniform rounded up and unlawfully detained 12,000 (mostly native-born) visitors to D.C., during a three-day period, in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. As journalist Lawrence Roberts reported in his book, Mayday 1971, a future Supreme Court chief justice named William Rehnquist, then a Justice Department lawyer, and his boss, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, assured Nixon that he had full legal authority to federalize the Guard and deploy active duty military personnel for this urban policing mission, while experimenting with “preventative detention” in the process.
As someone who spent three days in unlawful captivity in the old Washington coliseum, under the lackadaisical gaze of draft-dodging members of the Maryland National Guard, I can personally attest that confinement there was a day at the beach compared to being a long-term resident of the domestic gulag created by the Trump-Vance administration since last January.
But the Nixon Administration, like the law-breaking GOP regime today, sent very strong signals to politically connected DC law firms, advocacy groups, and educational institution that if they didn’t go along, to get along--despite mounting threats to the “rule of law”—they would face official retaliation in some form.
A Controversial Speaker
As co-deans of a very shaky, not yet accredited experimental law school closely identified with the previous Democratic Administration, Jean and Edgar Cahn were definitely not in a “resistance” mode. But they did more than just avert their gaze from the abuses of presidential power taking place, at the other end of 16th St. N.W, in downtown DC, just down the hill from ALS in Columbia Heights.
In the spring of 1973, while the dark clouds of the Watergate scandal were already gathering over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the ASL deans decided that the school would benefit from a prestigious speaker with cabinet-level clout inside the Nixon administration.
With very poor timing, they invited Richard Kleindienst. That required the bi-partisan assistance of Paul Porter, a legendary “super lawyer” on the ASL Board of Visitors. His corporate law firm, Arnold & Porter, had deep New Deal roots and its own business client-related reasons for making nice with Nixonites. Kleindienst had become U.S. Attorney General, because his former boss, John Mitchell, a Wall Street lawyer from New York, had stepped down to run the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). The CREEP played an infamous role in multiple Watergate-related crimes, which eventually led to Mitchell and fourteen other Nixon Administration officials or political operatives going to jail, after federal court convictions or guilty pleas.
Needless to say, anyone already associated with multiple DOJ prosecutions of leading figures opposed to the Vietnam War was not likely to get a warm welcome from anti-war movement veterans now trying to become “movement lawyers” at ASL. Some of those unhappy campers (this author among them) made sure that May 1—the official date of Law Day—was an occasion for observing its then less well honored radical roots.
Our ASL student chapter of the NLG invited Jim Matles, a left-wing Jewish immigrant from Romania who became a leading industrial union organizer in the 1930s and then national officer of the United Electrical Workers (UE). As a major target of McCarthy era deportation efforts in the 1950s, Matles provided quite a rhetorical contrast to a Barry Goldwater-loving Republican from Arizona. The UE leaders’ own “denaturalization” case was thrown out by a much better U.S. Supreme Court in 1958 because relevant documents had been unconstitutionally withheld from the defense at his trial.
When Kleindienst showed up, with corporate Democrat Paul Porter as his wing-man, the resulting exchange was less free-wheeling, but definitely educational. The Cahns warned us, in advance, that any organized or individual misbehavior would be grounds for immediate expulsion, and likely grounds for ASL never getting ABA accreditation.
The Pam Biondi of our Day
This put a lot of pressure on students eager to protest and denounce the Pam Bondi of our day. But we all kept our cool and found clever, if persistent, ways to rattle the AG’s chain. This included my effusively praising his use of undercover informants to expose the myriad conspiracies of dangerous pacifists like Jesuit priest Phil Berrigan and his Harrisburg 7 trial co-defendants.
Perhaps, I suggested, the Attorney General should consider the use of FBI undercover agents to infiltrate, with similar success, the executive suites of major corporations guilty of price-fixing and other anti-trust violations so the Nixon Administration could better crack down on white collar crime? With Paul Porter smiling and nodding at his side, Kleindienst seemed momentarily flummoxed. Was he being pranked by an actual Berrigan fan, rather than foe?
The only words he mumbled in response, on the record, indicated that the idea was indeed worthy of DOJ consideration. However, Kleindienst didn’t last long enough on the job to give it a try. And his track record-- as a key DOJ ally of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), a giant conglomerate that got the Nixon Administration to drop anti-trust litigation against it--suggested he was too cozy with big business to play federal cop with that firm or any other.
Soon thereafter, our esteemed visitor to Antioch—the nation’s top law enforcement officer-- was forced to resign in disgrace. He had failed to inform the FBI or prosecutors working under him what he knew about White House involvement in the Watergate burglary. A year later, around the time Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment for that crime and related cover ups, Kleindienst pleaded guilty to contempt of Congress.
That bit of lying under oath occurred at his confirmation hearing as AG and related to his role in dropping the government’s case against ITT in return for the company making a $400,000 contribution to the Republican National Convention.
Kleindienst’s unethical conduct led to a one-year suspension of his law license in Arizona and disbarment from practicing before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1981, he was charged with perjury, in a case involving a white-collar criminal, but succeeded in gaining an acquittal (unlike our classmate Mary Barry).
“I’ll Get Impeached!”
Will any of the current member of Trump’s gang, engaged in similar or worse misconduct, ever be brought to justice in our era? That remains an open question. It was among the many topics discussed at our Antioch re-union, held at a time when the legal profession was being roiled by White Houses shake-downs of big corporate law firms and related junior associate resignations and public protests.
In the spring of 2024, unlike half a century before, some May 1 demonstrations by concerned lawyers seemed to erase the difference between observing that date as Law Day--as opposed to celebrating it as an international workers’ holiday, the memory of which Law Day and the creation of (a U.S.-only) late summer Labor Day were both designed to wipe out.
In San Francisco last year, lawyers and law students rallied on May 1 outside the federal courthouse. Instead of what the SF Chronicle called a “typically low-key observance,” a very May Day-looking crowd of 1,000 jammed the streets to defend the Constitution against myriad Trump Administration threats.
“We are the last line of defense against tyranny,” declared Charles Jung, president of the city bar association that held the event as part of a “first of its kind national mobilization.” Jung led the crowd in militant chants, including “Hands Off Our Courts” and “If Lawyers Fear, Our Rights Disappear.” Signs displayed by the large and boisterous crowd called for “Due Process, Not Disappearances.”
Nine months later, with mid-term elections looming and Republican electoral prospects looking increasingly dim, the White House target of such protests by millions of people in 2025, expressed concern about Democrats regaining control of the House this November. “They’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Mr. Trump told Congressional Republicans. “I’ll get impeached.”
Having survived two previous impeachment efforts, the president is clearly not looking forward to a third trial. Even though he can still count on enough votes in the Senate to avoid the conviction there that would have been the fate of Richard Nixon, if Dick Kleindienst’s old boss had not resigned and left the White House in August, 2023, while Antioch law students, just up the road, were finishing up their first-year courses. Gathering again, all those years later in a 21st century “Occupied D.C.”—yet to be freed in 1970s-fashion from a Republican tyrant proving harder to topple—was a timely reminder of how much unfinished legal and political business lies ahead.
Steve Early started at Antioch Law School in 1972 but finished at Catholic University School of Law three years later. He passed the bar in Vermont and was admitted to the state and federal courts there in 1975. He has been a proud, pretty much non-practicing, lawyer ever since! He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
