Paul Alan Levy has been an attorney in Public Citizen’s Litigation Group since 1977. He is a longtime member of the AUD Board of Directors. Paul has represented dozens of unionists in union democracy cases, winning many important victories that protect the democratic rights of all union members. -eds.

Staughton Lynd and I became friends from our first days at University of Chicago Law School. The story had it that one of the conservative faculty at the school, had threatened to resign if Staughton was admitted (because of his perceived role in supporting undergraduate student protests at the University); and that a prominent liberal faculty member, Harry Kalven, said that HE would resign if Staughton were excluded. We were lucky to have him as a classmate. As a high school and college antiwar activist, I had long admired his Vietnam-related work, and we worked together in classes and in study groups.

He and his family came to my Freedom Seders, and I still recall the contributions he made to our Hagaddah (and his children told me when I saw them at his memorial service that the seders had made a huge impression on them).

It was because of Staughton that I became a public interest lawyer – he was offered the chance to spend his first summer after law school at Chicago’s only public interest law firm, then called Businessmen for the Public Interest, but he chose to work for a private practitioner representing workers, and recommended me for the job. That was my first exposure to public interest law. And it was because of Staughton that I became a union democracy lawyer. He had been involved in Steelworkers organizing in Chicago and came to law school because he saw the need for legal work to support the rank-and-file movement and, he said, “he wanted to add another arrow to my quiver.” He persuaded me that this work was politically important; so when I had a chance to come to Public Citizen to work on cases for the Teamster rank-and-file movement, I grabbed it.

Staughton had a self-effacing quality that recoiled from leadership roles and from public confrontation (which a number of the right-wing faculty tried to provoke), but he always had a steely determination to do what he thought was right and a strong moral core telling him what he thought the situation demanded. And he inspired many others to do the same. At his memorial service late last year, I met scores of other activists who had been motivated by Staughton to engage in political work that he deemed important. Turns out I was just one of many.