Martin Garbus (born August 8, 1934) is an American attorney. He has argued cases throughout the country involving first amendment, constitutional, criminal, copyright, and intellectual property law. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court, as well as trial and appellate courts throughout the United States in leading First Amendment cases. His cases have established precedents there and in other courts throughout the country. He has argued and written briefs that have been submitted to the United States Supreme Court; a number of which have resulted in changes in the law on a nationwide basis, including one described by Justice William J. Brennan as "probably the most important due process case in the Twentieth Century". An international observer in foreign elections, he was selected by PresidentJimmy Carter to observe and report on the elections in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Garbus also participated in drafting several constitutions and foreign laws, including the Czechoslovak constitution. He also has been involved in prisoner exchange negotiations between governments. He is the author of six books and over 30 articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Shouting Fire is a documentary film about his life and career. He received the Fulbright Award for his work on International Human Rights in 2010. In 2014, University College Dublin's Literary and Historical Society honored Garbus with the James Joyce Award for Excellence in Law. The same year Trinity College awarded him for his human rights and free speech work. He has represented dissidents in amongst other places such as China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, India, India, South Africa, and Taiwan.[1]
The Guardian called Garbus "one of the world’s finest trial lawyers" and the "founding partner of one of America’s most prestigious law firms".[2]The New York Law Journal called him "one of America's finest criminal lawyers...a legendary criminal lawyer." In 2007, Business Week called him "legendary", "a ferocious lawyer who has received numerous media citations as one of America’s leading trial lawyers" and a "ferocious litigator".[3]Time magazine named him "legendary, one of the best trial lawyers in the country."[4]Fortune magazine called him, "One of the nation's premier First Amendment attorneys", and "legendary".[4] Reuters called him a "famed lawyer"[5] while other media have called him "America's most prominent First Amendment lawyer" with an "extraordinarily diverse practice" and "one of the country's top ten litigators." Super Lawyers Magazine[6] designated him as a Superlawyer. New York magazine and Los Angeles magazine have named him both as one of America's best trial lawyers, and one of America's best intellectual property lawyers.[7] The New York Times described Garbus as being "on the front lines of... nearly every important First Amendment court battle for more than three decades." He has defended clients such as "Lenny Bruce, Samuel Beckett, Cesar Chavez, and Chuck D" and has "locked horns... with the Federal Government... and with writers and reporters," including Norman Mailer and Mike McAlary. Though "a hero to liberals," Garbus drew controversy when "his dedication to the First Amendment led him to defend the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Ill.," which "earned the enmity of many friends and colleagues."[8]
In 2023 and 2024, several of Martin Garbus‘ high-profile, controversial cases have been featured in “All the Court’s a Stage,” a series of dramatic adaptations by Susan Charlotte, directed by Antony Marsellis and presented by Cause Célèbre Productions, a Not-for-Profit organization. The series, based on the writings of Garbus, includes stories about the legal journeys of Samuel Beckett, Lenny Bruce, Daniel Ellsberg, Václav Havel, Henrietta Wright, Salman Rushdie, Andrei Sakharov, and "Jane Doe" and played to sold-out audiences in NY and LA. The casts included acclaimed Broadway, film, and television actors: two-time Tony Award winner James Naughton; Tony Award Nominees Penny Fuller, Zach Grenier, and Tony Roberts; Drama Desk Award winner Bob Dishy; Obie Award winner Larry Pine, and Jack Wetheral and Nesha Ward.
Mr. Garbus is a member of the Advisory Board, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital
Early career and legal scholarship
After law school and after two years in the United States Army, he clerked for Emile Zola Berman, an internationally known trial lawyer who represented Sirhan Sirhan, and Ephraim London, a Supreme Court advocate and Constitutional lawyer whose firm represented Alger Hiss, and who won every one of the nine cases he argued before the Supreme Court. He was in 1966 co-director of the Columbia University Center on Social Policy and Law while he taught law at Columbia. He was director-counsel of the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU, which had offices in Florida, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, Alabama, and California and now has a budget in excess of 2 hundred million dollars. Some of the leading civil rights lawyers, for a period of time staffed these offices, including Charles Morgan, Armand Derfner, Al Bronstein, Bruce Ennis, and Richard Sobel. While there, Mr. Garbus created the legal arguments of the case, O’Connor v. Donaldson, the first mental health case to reach the Supreme Court, which was argued by Bruce Ennis. Foundation clients included some of the leading civil rights figures including Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King. Additionally, Garbus was legal director and associate director of the ACLU, as well as director of the Lawyers Committee to Defend Civil Rights, ran for political office in 1974 and formed his own law firm, Frankfurt Garbus in 1977. He subsequently taught at an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, and has lectured at many law schools in the United States and abroad, including Harvard and Stanford. A Fulbright scholar, he taught in 2005 and 2006 at Tsinghua and Renmin law schools in Beijing, China. At the same time he represented Chinese dissidents, he taught the judges, government officials and drafters of China's new copyright and intellectual property laws. He also participated in "rule of law" seminars in Shanghai and Beijing.[citation needed][10]
Notable cases
Garbus was involved in the following notable cases:
Represented Herbert Blyden, the leader of the Attica rebellion.
Represented Elie Wiesel
Argued in the Supreme Court after a trial in Alabama, Garbus won, in King v. Smith(392 U.S. 309), a unanimous 9–0 decision striking down laws in 14 states on the grounds they violated the Constitution. These laws had disenfranchised over two million people.
Served as co-counsel in Ashton v. Kentucky(384 U.S. 195), and won a Supreme Court decision that effectively ended all criminal libel laws in the United States
Served as co-counsel in Jacobellis v. Ohio(378 U.S. 184), and won where the Supreme Court held unconstitutional an Ohio statute seeking to regulate motion pictures and, for the first time, defined the term "national community standards" that led to the ending of prosecution of obscenity cases in the United States.
Served as co-counsel in Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970) New York, an entitlement case in the Supreme Court that Justice William Brennan called, "probably the most important due process case of the Twentieth Century." that he considered "the proudest achievement of his entire service on the Court."
Unindicted co-conspirator in the criminal prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg.
Represented state HUAC defendants before Senator John Marchi of New York.
Represented migrants in Dilly Texas and Miami Florida
Represented Lenny Bruce in a criminal case in New York, successfully asserting a First Amendment defense against an obscenity charge.
Represented Don Imus when he was fired by CBS by asserting a First Amendment defense.
Represented Viking Press and Peter Matthiessen in one of the longest and most bitterly fought libel cases in American history that led to the development of libel precedent favoring journalists and publishers. Governor William Janklow filed a libel suit in South Dakota and FBI agents filed suit in Minnesota claiming they were libeled by the book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (see Peter Matthiessen#Crazy Horse lawsuits). The South Dakota court rejected Governor Janklow's attempt to stop Penguin from publishing the book. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the $450 million case and the Supreme Court refused to reverse it.
Represented 16 defendants in murder cases, stopping executions, while chairing the Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment.
Represented Leonard Peltier in a clemency petition to President Obama.
Represented civil rights leader Cesar Chavez in free speech, commercial and criminal cases and the boycott in California and elsewhere in the United States, all in support of the United Farm Workers.
Represented criminal defendants in the French Connection criminal cases in New York Federal Court.
Sued Eminem and Dr. Dre in copyright suit on behalf of French composer Jacques Loussier under New York Federal Court.
Represented author Terry McMillan in a commercial suit in San Francisco Federal Court to set aside a settlement agreement.
Represented songwriter and pianist Oksana Grigorieva against actor Mel Gibson. Grigorieva alleged that Gibson beat her during their relationship and then defamed her in the media.
Defended the Cuban Five, accused of murder in the Florida Federal Courts before the United Nations and in their application for clemency to President Obama.
Defended Sikh nationalists before the Punjab Court and in the United Nations.
Defended media defendants and investors in libel and other commercial cases brought by fraudulent Chinese reverse merger corporations in the New York State courts.
Defended Chinese dissidents in Beijing and Shanghai.
Sued by South African government for disbarment due to articles Garbus wrote in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books criticizing South Africa's legal process. The case was dismissed on First Amendment grounds.
International elections observer with President Jimmy Carter's commission.
Garbus spoke with journalist Christiane Amanpour about challenges to free speech, including social media, political vitriol, and the role of the media. He also spoke with Daniel Lelchuk, who runs the Talking Beats podcast, for a discussion of the first amendment—what it really means, and how perhaps, in this social media dominated era, there are implications that go far beyond what previously would have been just a person yelling in the town square that is reported by the local newspaper.
Garbus is also a TED speaker, where he presented on Free Speech and the First Amendment.
International work
Garbus has worked for the governments of the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rwanda, and China as a consultant on constitutional, media and communications law. Recently in 2002, the government of China hired Garbus to help address the problems posed by digital piracy. He represented dissidents Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Andrei Sakharov. In 2004, he was appointed advisor to the Chinese team responsible for the creation of China's intellectual property laws.[citation needed]
He has traveled to Russia, former Czechoslovakia, Rwanda, China, Cambodia, North and South Vietnam, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Spain, Tanzania, Namibia, and Argentina defending human rights. He taught law in China, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa. He also worked on the writing of constitutions in four countries.
Personal life
Garbus has two daughters. Cassandra Garbus is an author and teacher who is married to David Moreno. Liz Garbus a director and producer of documentaries and is married to producer Dan Cogan.
Awards and recognition
Garbus has won several awards for his work:
PEN USA First Amendment Award of Honor, 2007,
New York University Law Alumni Achievement Award, 2004,
Marquis Who's Who in American Law (2017 and prior years)
Civil Liberties Union Award, 2007
Senator William Fulbright Award for global leadership in international law, 2012
James Joyce Award from the University of Dublin for Excellence in Law, 2014
Trinity College Award for defending First Amendment cases, 2014
Books
North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five (The New Press, 2019)
The Next 25 Years: How the Supreme Court Will Make You Forget the Meaning of Words Like Privacy, Equality and Freedom (Seven Stories Press 2007)
Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of America Law (Times Books, New York, 2002; Times Books softcover, 2003)
Tough Talk: How I Fought For Writers, Comics, Bigots, and the American Way, introduction by David Halberstam (Random House-Times Books, 1998, Times Books softcover, 1999)
Traitors and Heroes (Athenaeum, 1987; Random House softcover, 1988)
Ready for the Defense (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1971; Avon softcover, 1972, and Carroll & Graf reprint, 1995)
North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five (The New Press; Illustrated edition, 2019)
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution sets forth rights related to criminal prosecutions. It was ratified in 1791 as part of the United States Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has applied all but one of this amendment's protections to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires U.S. states to provide attorneys to criminal defendants who are unable to afford their own. The case extended the right to counsel, which had been found under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to impose requirements on the federal government, by imposing those requirements upon the states as well.
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