Home and Office of WIlliam Kunstler ca. 1933

William Kunstler was an American radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his involvement in some of the most high-profile and controversial civil rights and civil liberties cases of the late 20th century. A native New Yorker, he attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Yale College, and Columbia University Law School in 1948. Kunstler practiced family and small business law in the 1950s and was an associate professor of law at New York Law School (1950–1951) before entering civil rights litigation in the 1960s. Kunstler's defense of the Chicago Seven from 1969–1970 led The New York Times to label him "the country's most controversial and, perhaps, its best-known lawyer". He is also well known for defending members of the Catonsville Nine, the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground Organization, Attica Prison rioters, and the American Indian Movement. Kunstler also won a de facto segregation case regarding the District of Columbia's public schools and "disinterred, singlehandedly" the concept of federal removal jurisdiction in the 1960s. In late 1995, Kunstler died in New York City of heart failure at the age of 76.