1938 August 14

ABA Creates Bill of Rights Committee

 

The American Bar Association, the principal professional association of American lawyers, having ignored civil liberties since its founding, on this day created a special committee to defend the Bill of Rights.

With the prominent attorney Grenville Clark as chair, the committee filed amicus briefs in several important Supreme Court cases, including Hague v. CIO (June 5, 1939) and cases involving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. One of the most important of the Jehovah’s Witnesses cases was West Virginia v. Barnette, in which the Supreme Court held that the government cannot compel someone –school children in this case– to salute the American flag in violation of their conscience.

The creation of the Bill of Rights Committee was part of an important shift in American attitudes about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights from 1939 to 1941, largely as a result of awareness of totalitarianism in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. The Bill of Rights Committee functioned for only a few years before fading away during World War II.

Read about the rediscovery of Americanism in American literature in the late 1930s: Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942)

Learn about the ABA Bill of Rights committee in Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)

Read: Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (2000)

Learn more about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ contributions to civil liberties: Shawn Francis Peters, Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (2000)

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