A Life on the Court’s Left
Leftist lawyer Michael Tigar has spent his life in courtrooms defending a wide range of names big and small on the Left, from Vietnam War draft resisters to Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. He captures them all in a new memoir.
Michael Tigar arrives at the federal courthouse in Denver with his wife, Jane Blanksteen, and daughter for opening statements in the trial of Terry Nichols in 1997. (DOUG COLLIER/AFP via Getty Images)
In the spring of 1960, in the wake of the Southern student sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counters in North Carolina, a group of us University of California, Berkeley students mounted solidarity picket lines at our own local Woolworths. Covering the demonstrations for radio station KPFA was a volunteer reporter and UC sophomore named Mike Tigar. (We were both Mikes back then.)
Mike interviewed me, we had a good time talking, and I invited him over for dinner. Afterward, going through my bookshelf, he asked to borrow C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite. He left the house, I went to bed. In the wee hours, I was woken by the doorbell. It was Mike, returning the book, telling me, “This was great. Got anything else by him?” It was the beginning of sixty-year-long friendship. But at the time I thought, “Who the hell is this guy?”
To answer that question comes a memoir by Tigar, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change.
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