William Kunstler died the last week in New York. Very well known as a " Radical" lawyer he has been the most important defender of the Civil Rights Movement, including being the lawyer of M. L. King.

In 1991, when Emma Bonino and Marco Taradash were arrested in front of the City Hall in New York for having distributed clean syringes as protest against an absurd antiprohibitionist drug policy, Kunstler defended them. Kunstler signed all of the TRP's appeals over the last years.

The following is an article from the NATION which we feel honors him justly.

Bill Kunstler died of a heart attack a few weeks after performing a nightclub stand-up comedy routine and a few days before the twenty-fourth anniversary of the bloody police assault that ended the Attica rebellion, which Kunstler labored bravely to prevent. such was the range of his life. He was so insistently a public personality that it is easy to overlook his contributions to the law, and to both the theory and practice of civil rights advocacy.

Indeed, the case that gave Kunstler the deepest satisfaction was not a media showcase; it was HOBSON V. HANSEN, in 1967, when he convinced the District Court to desegregate Washington, D.C.'s public schools, and by extension all other school systems where segregation persisted. "Bill felt that because he won that case, young black people had a better chance at education," his law partner, Ron Kuby, recalled. In 1965 in DOMBROWSKI V. PFISTER kunstler got the Court to halt the prosecution and harassment of civil rights workers in Louisiana and throughout the South under state subversion laws. Together with Arthur Kinoy he resurrected century-old laws to take civil rights cases to federal court, out of the hands of segregationist Southern judges. And despite his reputation as a legal lone ranger, he helped establish and maintain the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Kunster also changed lawyering itself. "He demystified the courtroom," said his friend Haywood Burns. "He made it possible to see new and different ways of being a lawyer." That meant a wholehearted embrace of movement clients, and what Randolph Scott-McLaughlin of C.C.R., who went to work for Kunstler right out of law school, describes as "guerrilla lawyering. His favorite analogy was David and Goliath, and he was always probing for the one weakness in cases no one else thought were winnable."

Kunstler was lured from a conventional commercial law practice by McCarthyism, galvanized by the Southern civil rights movement and radicalized, once and for all, by the Chicago Seven trial. (And by the way, last year Paul Krassner wrote of being cross-examined by Kunstler after having dropped acid. Out of deference, he now says, his memoir didn't mention that Kunstler, too, was stoned that day - he had shared the puritanism of the old left, and he never collapsed into the exhausted complacency that overtook much of the new; his was a fighting spirit that survived the massacres at Attica and Wounded Knee and the revival of the death penalty, which he fought to abolish three decades ago.

Throughout his career Bill was passionate and prolific; here at THE NATION and at other magazines his letters, essays and poems arrived regularly. His epitaph could perhaps be the words that came spontaneously from several of his closest friends and colleagues: Bill Kunstler never abandoned a client.