Michael Ratner: How He Led the Center for Constitutional Rights & His Lasting Legacy

Summary

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is an American lawyer and human rights activist. He is a long-time leader on behalf of civil and political rights and liberties in the US, has worked for decades to fight for the rights of America's poorest and most vulnerable individuals, and has been a champion of international human rights and economic justice.


Michael Ratner was born in New York in 1943 and grew up in a Jewish family. He attended Harvard College, graduating in 1965. He then attended Yale Law School, graduating in 1969. After graduation, he worked as a public defender in New Jersey and as a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York.

In 1973, Ratner was elected president of CCR, the first organization formed and created solely to protect civil and political rights in the US. He is the longest-serving president in the organization's history. Under his leadership, CCR has developed into a powerful and influential organization fighting for civil and political rights and liberties, including free speech and racial justice, economic justice, and international human rights.

Ratner has successfully taken on large corporations and governments, including in the Supreme Court, and has been involved in a variety of high-profile cases, such as defending the rights of Guantánamo Bay prisoners, the Guantanamo Lawsuits, and the International Criminal Court. In addition, he has served as counsel in many of the most significant legal challenges to the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies.

Michael Ratner continues to serve as a leader in the human rights field. He has authored several books and has appeared on numerous talk shows and radio programs. He has been honored with awards from various organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and has received the ACLU's Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty Award. His unwavering commitment to justice and respect for the rule of law have inspired admiration from people all over the world.

Michael Ratner is an American lawyer and human rights activist best known for leading the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). CCR is the first organization formed and created solely to protect civil and political rights in the U.S. Ratner has worked for decades to fight for the rights of America's poorest and most vulnerable individuals and has been a champion of international human rights and economic justice. Ratner is the longest-serving president of CCR and has successfully taken on large corporations and governments, including in the Supreme Court, and has been involved in a variety of high-profile cases. Ratner has authored several books, has appeared on numerous talk shows and radio programs, and has been honored with awards from various organizations. His continued commitment to justice and respect for the rule of law have been an inspiration to people all over the world.
 

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights

Michael Ratner, who passed away in 2016, was an American lawyer and the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) from 1990 to 2016. He had a long career as an advocate for human rights and civil liberties, which included the representation of victims of human rights abuses and the defense of civil liberties in courtrooms, in the media and on the streets.

Ratner started his career as an attorney for the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and then joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1974. He provided legal assistance to the Attica Prisoners' Defense Committee, helped to challenge the constitutionality of the USA Patriot Act, and was a part of several acts of protest and civil disobedience. He helped to bring a number of cases before U.S. courts and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights on behalf of individuals and organizations in the U.S. and around the world.

Ratner defended the rights of poor and marginalized communities, and was a leader in advocating for a fair justice system and the restoration of civil rights for all. He had an unwavering commitment to challenging legal injustice and to using the power of the law to defend the rights of the underrepresented. He helped to bring cases challenging racism, including lawsuits against police brutality, racial profiling and economic discrimination.

Ratner also fought for the rights of those who had been wrongfully convicted or wrongfully detained. He provided pro bono legal representation to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and advocated for the closure of the detention facility. He also represented clients in cases involving the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers.
 

Michael Ratner's Legacy and Commitment to Human Rights

Michael Ratner's tireless dedication to human rights and social justice are a major part of his legacy. As President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Ratner was at the vanguard of the struggle for civil liberties and human rights in the United States. He used the power of the law to fight for the voiceless and those whose rights were infringed upon, and he brought a human face to the issue. Ratner's commitment to justice was unwavering, and his legacy lives on in the work of the CCR.

Ratner's legal advocacy was informed by a commitment to ensure that all people had access to justice, equality and freedom. His dedication to human rights was in evidence in his defense of civil liberties, his work to challenge the USA Patriot Act and his relentless fight for the rights of prisoners and detainees. Ratner used the law to fight for the rights of those who were unable to do so for themselves, and his legacy will live on in the work of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

During the Columbia University riots in 1968, Michael Ratner was picked up ''like a matchstick'' by a ''beefy, longshoremen type'' police officer and thrown to the ground. Ratner says that bloody event changed his life, causing him to dedicate his career to civil rights.

''I never went back,'' Ratner told LawCrossing. ''Instead of really taking a job which I had for the next year at a liberal Democratic big firm named Arnold and Porter in Washington, I decided to really devote my life to civil rights essentially right there.''

Almost four decades later, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights is still at it, litigating rights cases around the world, including Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

Ratner had taken a year off from law school in 1968 to work on a school segregation case in Baltimore for the Legal Defense Fund. Martin Luther King was killed and the city erupted in protests. When he returned to New York, students had taken over Columbia University to protest the treatment of black students and he joined in.

Those events plus the trial of the Chicago Seven, the Black Panthers and other political events shaped the lives of all the students at Columbia during that time, he says.

''The war in Vietnam was beginning to reach a height in terms of drafting. It was 1968, you had Martin Luther King killed; you had JFK killed that same year,'' he said. ''The world was changing and it was the shift - it was really the shift not just politically, things like Vietnam and the South, but my law school started with 15 women in the class and now it's more than 50 percent.

''So the shift was going on in terms of race, in terms of women, in terms of our social values and not just our political values. It was my friends who were at that law school with me. Many of us have remained true to some sort of social good or social transformation, whether it's through Legal Aid or a variety of things with some sort of public good.''

Ratner believes young lawyers today are living through a similar time of dramatic shifts, particularly in the rule of law and what he considers abuses of executive power since Sept. 11. But now young attorneys are often too deep in debt to follow their hearts or political consciences.

''I made $12,000 when I clerked for a judge when a good law school starting salary for a firm may have been $18,000. It wasn't like today when it's $180,000 coming out of New York,'' he said. ''Leaving law school with $100,000 in debt. It's a pretty big problem.''

But there are so many new opportunities for lawyers in small firms, like immigration law and welfare law.

''The problem is I hear terrible stories about most lawyers who go into big firms, they really don't like it. They're working 70 hours a week. So, fine, you can get your kids a new tricycle, but you never see your kids. I just think there are options. When I left law school, that was the time after the Watts riots when they set up legal services. You had a huge number of jobs opening up. Now there's much less money. You don't have that option as clearly.

''I think one option is to avoid big firms. There are many smaller firms that do civil rights, Title VII, Title IX, women's discrimination, race discrimination. You're not going to make a million dollars a year, but you're going to make a decent living. And you're going to get a good experience. I do think people going into Legal Aid for a couple of years or for people who want to be prosecutors, which I never wanted to be, those are really good experiences. My recommendation is people should get into court right away and not worry so much about high fallutin' jobs for the first couple of years. You can always get the high fallutin' jobs.''

When Ratner finished law school, he spent a fulfilling year clerking for Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman federal judge. When his year was up, he began weighing his options. Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered him a teaching position at Rutgers. Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard offered him a job in their firm.

He chose the Center for Constitutional Rights.

''Because I really at that point wanted a more progressive place that was really going to be in the middle of the thick of the political movements of the time and the major issues.''

He had left the Center briefly during the 1970s: to open his own practice and then to teach at Yale. But he returned.

''I decided I liked having the backup of the Center and I like doing only political cases and not having to charge my clients, which wasn't my favorite thing to do, particularly when they were poor.

''I look at the major civil rights issues and political issues and I really wind up litigating those. So if you look at my life historically, it was certainly in the eighties I did eight years of nothing but Central America and FBI spying here. I litigated 14 cases around US government intervention in Central America, killing, murder, all kinds of human rights cases, going after the FBI here. In the nineties, I represented the Haitian refugees at Guantanamo while I was teaching at Yale. Then in this generation, post-9/11, that's where I would have to say all my work has come together.''

Ratner feels there's still much to be done and blames George W. Bush for abusing his executive power.

''On Nov. 13, 2001 the president came down with Military Order Number 1, which is the one that allows the tribunals and also executive detention — you know, you can detain anybody the president designated as an alleged international terrorist. That's when I just decided this is it. This was a military order in the middle of this terrorist attack and the president can't be taking that kind of executive power.

Ratner believes young lawyers have an obligation to defend people who are locked up without charge or trial in places like Guantanamo, Bagram in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Although he says he abhors the Taliban and fundamental religions, he feels fundamental rights are involved and is committed to defending detainees - despite often receiving hate mail and even death threats.

''If we're not a country of laws, what are we? When I look at what happened at Abu Ghraib, [the U.S. soldiers who allegedly abused Iraqi prisoners] are no worse than me or other people. What happens is when you lift the lid of conduct from what prohibits things, people go back to their instincts. They really do. Primitive instincts. Law is what stands between us and Abu Ghraib and the idea that the executive in this country was willing to dispense with it so freely and easily, it's really put at their doorstep what happened in Abu Ghraib.''

Ratner, who has two children and is married to a businesswoman and producer of the Democracy Now news program, says young lawyers now are much more well-informed and worldly, which he thinks will be good for civil rights. The secret to being a good attorney, he says, is finding an area of law you're passionate about and not worrying too much about making partner.

At 61, he says he ''feels like a kid, because I love what I do.''