“The late human rights lawyer took on some of the most important cases of our time, including defending Guantanamo Bay detainees and representing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange…

In a new, posthumously published book, ‘Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer,’ readers are able to learn from Ratner’s life and words about how and why he took on the critical cases he did. Fellow attorney Michael Smith and former executive editor at The Nation Zachary Sklar join Robert Scheer on this week’s ‘Scheer Intelligence’ to talk about their late friend Michael Ratner. Sklar, who edited ‘Moving the Bar’ for OR Books, and Smith, who wrote the book’s introduction, discuss Ratner’s most significant cases, including what he would think of how Assange is being treated today, and also offer insight into Ratner’s unwavering dedication to ethics.”

“Ratner’s opening illustrations show the legal system not as some neutral forum but itself as an instrument of state repression. It takes a special brand of tenacity for a radical lawyer to use the law, designed in so many ways to codify unequal power relationships, as a battleground to challenge those power relationships. Indeed, Ratner has shown that a radical lawyer must face often impossible odds, and get back up to keep fighting. His autobiography provides valuable insight from his role as part of the legal arm of movement…

Moving the Bar is filled with a lifetime of wisdom, inspiration, lawyers’ war stories, and movement activism, of which this review only scratches the surface. While this book is accessible for anyone interested in movement work, it provides particularly valuable guidance to radical-minded attorneys seeking to navigate the tension between working within the law and serving the radical politics that seek to break through the legal strictures of white supremacy and capitalism. Ratner exemplifies the ability to do this without subordinating radical politics to the regressive tendencies of the legal system, and to fulfill one’s full potential as a movement lawyer.”

“Indeed, Ratner was a long-time opponent of illegal US wars… He sued Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Rumsfeld, the FBI and the Pentagon for their violations of law. He challenged US policy in Cuba, Iraq, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Israel/Palestine. Ratner was lead counsel for whistleblower Julian Assange, who is facing 175 years in prison for exposing US war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.”

“Michael’s passionate opposition to imperialist U.S. wars goes back to Vietnam. In the 1980s he attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to challenge U.S. wars against the revolutionary governments of El Salvador and Nicaragua. In 2008, Michael made clear his and the Center for Constitutional Rights’ opposition to war: ‘We have been involved in cases regarding the roundups, warrantless wiretapping and torture. We are firmly against the war in Iraq, and [opposed] the war against Iraq three months before it started. It is a made-up war, an illegal war. We are anxious to [litigate] the Blackwater case because it will deal with the war. The war is hard to get at legally.’ For this reason he attacked it from as many angles as possible, while always insisting on the outrageousness of wars.”

“Readers would be rewarded by reading [Michael] Ratner’s autobiography Moving the Bar: My Life As a Radical Lawyer (OR Books)…

Ratner was an early and outspoken opponent of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq… But Ratner wasn’t satisfied to just vehemently oppose Bush’s wars.  Real human beings were being detained, tortured, injured and killed while in US custody.  Ratner and his colleagues at the Center of Constitutional Rights designed innovative lawsuits based on US and international law to challenge these cruel and illegal practices.  In retrospect, human rights organizations and advocates for international peace have applauded Ratner and his team for what they did.”

“To his dying breath, Michael fought against war in every forum he could access – courtroom, classroom and media. Yes, he is remembered for the Guantanamo litigation. But that was hardly his only anti-war campaign. He pressed for Donald Rumsfeld to be charged with war crimes in Germany under a radical theory of universal jurisdiction. He sued private military contractors for war crimes because he saw the connection between capitalism and war. He represented Muslim men rounded up after 9/11 and beaten in jail. He was a consistent critic of Israel for its military occupation of Palestinian territory.”

“That President Joe Biden faces pressure to close Guantánamo and end this travesty of justice is due in significant part to the efforts of Michael Ratner and his allies to challenge the strained ‘wartime’ justifications for the US government’s treatment of detainees there.”

“Bill Kunstler used to say that there are no green pastures, that every generation has its own battles to fight. This is why Michael wrote his memoir Moving the Bar.

I hope that people will read it, particularly young people, that they will absorb its lessons.”

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“[Ratner] lived up to Camus’s dictum that it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.“

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“How do leftleaning Americans who have a special corner of their heart devoted to Israel give up that attachment in the face of unending human rights violations?

That is one drama of the very full life of Michael Ratner, the legendary human rights lawyer who died in 2016 at 72. Ratner’s posthumous memoir was published in May, and it offers an intimate narrative of his own transformation on the Palestine question.”

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“In the name of setting the historical record straight, here’s the late great Michael Ratner, making the unimpeachable case against Rumsfeld for his war crimes in Iraq. “

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“Michael Ratner was one of the most accomplished radical lawyers of his generation, representing clients from Attica to Guantanamo. He served as president of the National Lawyers Guild and was legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights for many years. Radicalzed in the late 1960s, he had no illusions about the ruling-class bias of the law under capitalism. He believed political action outside the courtroom was as important as anything that happened inside it.

Ratner died all too soon of cancer in 2016, at the age of 72. His friends completed the memoir he began before his death[:] Moving the Bar, published on May Day.”

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“Ratner showed that one can indeed be both a radical and a lawyer—by acting “one hundred percent on principle,” and by using the law on behalf of the vulnerable to hold the powerful to account.”

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“There is so much more here, chapter by chapter, from the 1970s up to Ratner’s life-robbing illness, that the reader can take in, along with Ratner’s self-presentation, how he understood cases over the decades, how he figured out strategies and worked so furiously—and also brilliantly—to make those strategies work.

Dig in, reader. You are in for a treat, and an education.”

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“Ratner for the Defense: the Legacy of a Lefty Lawyer”

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“How a middle-class Jewish kid from Cleveland chose not to go into the family building-supply business but instead became a visionary and peripatetic human rights lawyer.“

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