American Civil Liberties Union years and the role of free speech in American democracy

After his departure from Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963 Neier was hired by the ACLU where he would rise to the position of National Executive Director (1970-1978). Following the social tumult of the 1960s and coinciding with the Nixon Watergate era, Neier’s leadership of the ACLU witnessed a number of intense debates over rights and responsibilities in American democracy. In the collection, narrators speak to several of the most important dimensions played by the ACLU through litigation in these debates, including in the formation of the Women’s Rights Project, led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the ACLU’s defense of the rights of Nazi protesters in Skokie, Illinois.

Neier: I had been involved in a handful of women’s rights cases at NYCLU, and when I wanted to launch a women’s rights project, I started asking around, “Who is there who could lead the project?” I had not heard of Ruth. And in talking to various people in the organization, I was told that there was a woman at Rutgers Law School who was taking on women’s rights cases for the New Jersey ACLU, and she was doing very well. And so, I asked to see her, and met her on that basis. And then when I met her, I was very taken with the way she approached the women’s rights effort. The primary approach up to that moment was, you know, we’ve got to deal with equality for women, we got to deal with equal pay for equal work, we’ve got to deal with employment in various positions, matters of that sort.

Ruth’s approach was somewhat different. She said that what she wanted to do was to challenge stereotypes. That there were stereotypes of women as caregivers and men as breadwinners, and she wanted to deal with both men and women as both caregivers and breadwinners. And that was her primary framing of the issues, and I was very taken with her approach. And, as always, when I interview people, I asked for a substantial amount of written work by the person. And I read the legal briefs that Ruth had written, and there was not an extra word in her legal briefs. They were tight, taut, sharply reasoned, and thoroughly persuasive documents. So, I was very taken both by my conversation with her and by the written work.
From Oral History Interview with Aryeh Neier.

Strossen: So, Aryeh wrote a classic book shortly after the Skokie case [National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie] called Defending My Enemy—it had a subtitle as well, something about the risks of freedom—which I do re-read every few years, and I consider it to be absolutely classic work which I’m constantly recommending to other people. It’s out of print, so Aryeh, quite a few years ago, gave me permission to send PDF copies to anybody who’s interested. That’s, I think, very generous of him and I continue to get great feedback on it. I wanted to say in that spirit, especially because there are such ongoing debates about this issue. If he had done nothing else in his absolutely towering human rights, civil liberties career other than write that book, that still would’ve made him a hero and a giant.
Nobody has made a more powerful case, yet the case continues to have to be made certainly in today’s era.
From Oral History Interview with Nadine Strossen.