GN summer fall09 Digital.indd - National Lawyers Guild

Guild Notes ▪ Summer/Fall 2009Doris Brin Walker: a celebration of 90 yearsby Terry Koch“The NLG should pay more attentionto global warming.”This is where my conversation withDoris Brin Walker (Dobby) started ona July afternoon, just a few weeks afterher 90th birthday celebration.As a 16 year-old in Dallas in 1935,Dobby’s parents decided that she wouldstart college in Austin, Texas. Criticalpolitical understandings occurred whenthe Texas House Unamerican ActivitiesCommittee subpoenaed her geologyprofessor. She later transfered to Universityof Southern California, but aftertaking the train there with her father andlooking at the school, she said, “Notfor me.” She crossed town to the publicschool, University of California-LosAngeles (UCLA).When asked who she looks up to,Dobby replies: “Larry Sperber. Wemet at UCLA and he made me a Marxist.”While at UCLA, Dobby attended apeace demonstration, her first politicalactivity. She took philosophy withProf. Piatt and became an atheist. Shethen joined Alpha Epsilon Phi, married(and later divorced) a member of ZetaBeta Tau, and learned to love music(especially Bach), which she says “hasmade an enormous difference in mylife, having grown up without music athome.”On a train from Los Angeles toTexas, Dobby picked up a discardedcopy of The Nation and had an epiphanywhile reading an article about theACLU. It was then that she decided tobecome a lawyer. After she graduatedPhi Beta Kappa from UCLA, she wasaccepted to UC Berkeley―Boalt Hall,graduating in 1942. She was the onlywoman in her law school class.After her graduation from Boalt,the Office of Price Administration hiredher. Once she was sworn in as an attorney,Dobby joined the Communist Party(CP-USA). In 1944, she moved on towork at the Gladstein labor law firm.By 1946, she had joined her comradeJessica Mitford as an organizer for theFederal Workers Union.In Oakland, she worked in theHeinz, Del Monte, and Gerber canneries;she was consistently fired for hernon-surreptitious and blatant organizingactivity. Cutter Laboratories hiredDoris Brin Walker and Marjorie Cohn atDoris’ 90th birthday party. Photo courtesyof Marjorie Cohn.her as a clerk-typist in 1947 and firedher after a strike in 1949. That incidentgave rise to her status as a namedplaintiff in the 1956 Supreme Courtcase, Black v. Cutter Labs. Cutter Labsostensibly fired her from her positionin 1949 because she did not discloseher past union activity on her application.In truth, she was fired for herunion activity at Cutter Labs, a practicethat is still prohibited and yet stillhappens all the time.Dobby’s appeal was not upheld bythe Court, but Justice Hugo Black wrotean eloquent dissent supporting her position.By the time the Supreme Courtrendered its verdict in her case, she hadbeen a litigator for six years in the SanFrancisco Bay area, one of only twowomen doing such work.Also, by 1956, the Office and ProfessionalWorkers Association/Unionhad succumbed to the Landrum-GriffinAct’s anti-communism. For Dobby, discriminationand persecution for politicalbeliefs subsumed the discriminationwhich occurred because of gender. Althoughshe has never viewed her statusas a woman as a handicap, Dobby didencounter problems of gender discriminationwithin the CP-USA.Some of her favorite cases are thePowell Sedition Case, Nancy Stoller’sUC Santa Cruz tenure case, the successfuldefense of Professor Angela Davisfrom a charge of murder, and a CaliforniaSupreme Court victory in Edwardsv. Steele.Throughout her life, dialecticshave helped her understand differentsides of cases, and she would like to beremembered as honest and a “left-wingradical.”Dobby gets her news by readingthe San Francisco Chronicle, the NewYork Review of Books, the Guardian,The Nation, and the internet. She doesnot watch television, but got her firstcomputer at the age of 88.She continues her NLG activitiesyearly at the Conference of Delegatesmeeting. Still an active debater, shewas honored by diverse bar groups andcounty associations for more than 50years of participation in the conference.At the 1970 convention in WashingtonD.C., Dobby became the firstwoman president of the NLG. At thetime, a young man speaking from thefloor called her “a man in a woman’sskirt,” and no NLG member, man orwoman, said anything. A bitter memoryof this occasion still remains withher after nearly 39 years. This shouldremind people that politics, more thangender, divides people. □▪ 28 ▪