The Emerging Police State
Resisting illegitimate authority
William M. Kunstler
Introduction by Michael Ratner
The defiance, anger, passion and optimism of America’s “most celebrated and most detested” radical lawyer William Kunstler ring throughout this selection of his unpublished speeches.
This book also includes transcripts of secretly recorded speeches from Kunstler’s FBI file. Kunstler was outspoken in his opposition to war, racism and political repression, defending Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Chicago Seven and countless others. Consequently, the FBI maintained an extensive file on him, including secretly recorded transcripts of many of Kunstler’s public speeches.
The introduction by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, highlights the fact that Kunstler’s warning about the encroaching police state is even more prescient today.
William Kunstler was the most famous radical lawyer of his time, often compared to Clarence Darrow of an earlier era. He represented, among many others, the Chicago Seven, the Attica prisoners, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.
The struggle to maintain human liberty and to resist repression and tyranny is the perennial obligation of all who understand its necessity.
—William Kunstler
A warrior whose weapons were words...
—Mumia Abu-Jamal
William Kunstler refused to remain silent in the face of chronic and systematic injustice.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Emerging Police State contains the distilled wisdom of the most effective and eloquent civil liberties lawyer of our times.
—Holly Maguigan, co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers
