Martin Garbus

Martin Garbus (born August 8, 1934) is an American attorney.

Martin Garbus
Born	(1934-08-08) August 8, 1934 (age 90) Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Hunter College New York University Law School
Occupation(s)	Attorney, author, teacher
Years active	1963-present
Children	Cassandra Elizabeth "Liz"

Education

Garbus graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1951. He earned his undergraduate degree at Hunter College in 1955 and his Juris Doctor from New York University Law School.^[1] During that time, he drove a taxi for two years in New York and worked at The Ford assembly line in Tarrytown, New York. He thereafter attended Columbia University as a master's candidate in economics, at The New School as a master's candidate in English and at New York University Law School as a master's candidate in law. He was admitted in New York, and six other states and federal appeals courts, to the United States Supreme Court Bar in 1963.^{[citation needed]}

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 of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as its associate director. He was also 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 as 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][2]}

Notable cases

Garbus' clients include Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, Samuel Beckett, Al Pacino, Daniel Ellsberg, Philip Roth, Michael Moore, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Michael York, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Martin, Pace Gallery, Estate of Mark Rothko, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cincinnati Museum of Fine Art, Robert Redford, Spike Lee, Sally Mann, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Boudin, Garry Marshall, Marilyn Monroe, Igor Stravinsky, Nora Ephron, Salman Rushdie, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Bertelsmann, Penguin Books, Putnam,^[3] Grove Press, The Sundance Film Festival, Alger Hiss, Ecuadorian plaintiffs, Estate of John Cheever, Julie Taymor, Justices in India, Knopf, Leonard Weinglass, Michael Bloomberg, Michael York, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Philip Roth, Rwanda, Sean Connery, Sonny Mehta, Sophia Loren to clients, Steven Donziger, Susan Sontag, Viking Penguin, and William Kunstler.^[4]

In January 2021, Garbus called on the New York State Bar Association and one of the Appellate Divisions of the New York Supreme Court to disbar Rudy Giuliani following the 2021 United States Capitol attack where in a prior "Save America" rally, Giuliani encouraged "trial by combat."^[5][6]

Public speaking

Garbus has participated in lectures and debates before the American Bar Association, the Bar Associations of New York, Washington and Los Angeles on a variety of topics including trial practice, jury selection, copyright and the Supreme Court. Garbus debated former Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr at venues across the country. He served as a commentator for NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Charlie Rose, CNN, Fox News, Court TV, CCTV in China and the BBC, Time and Newsweek. Garbus has written numerous pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Huffington Post.^{[citation needed]}

Garbus' career is set forth in the award-winning HBO documentary Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech.

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][7]}

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. Liz Garbus, a director and producer of documentaries, is married to producer Dan Cogan.

Awards and recognition

• PEN USA First Amendment Award of Honor (2007)
• New York University Law Alumni Achievement Award (2004)
• Hunter College Law Alumni Achievement Award (2005)
• Hunter College Hall of Fame (2005)
• Marquis Who's Who in America (2017 and prior years)
• 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)

Bibliography

For a full list of books, see Bibliography of Martin Garbus

• Ready for the Defense (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1971; Avon softcover, 1972, and Carroll & Graf reprint, 1995)
• Traitors and Heroes (Athenaeum, 1987; Random House softcover, 1988)
• 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)
• Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of America Law (Times Books, New York, 2002; Times Books softcover, 2003)
• 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)
• 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 Candy Store, to be published 2025

Book Reviews

• What You Should Know About Politics, But Don't, Introduction, January 29, 2024
• The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five (publishersweekly.com), Publishers Weekly, 2019
• North of Havanna, Kirkus Reviews, June 4, 2019
• North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five, The New Press, June 2019
• The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans, Publishers Weekly, February 2007
• COURTING DISASTER: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law, Publishers Weekly, September 17, 2007
• COURTING DISASTER | Kirkus Reviews, September 17, 2002
• Courting Disaster, Lawyer's Bookshelf, New York Law Journal, September 12, 2002.
• Expletive Included, The New York Times, August 9, 1998
• Tough Talk, Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1998
• Tales of the First Amendment, Miami Herald, October 1988
• Traitors and Heroes | Foreign Affairs, December 1, 1987
• Traitors & Heroes: A Lawyer's Memoir, Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1987
• Traitors & Heroes, Publishers Weekly, July 14, 1987
• Using the Law to Change Society, the Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1971.
• Martin Garbus, Young Civil Rights Attorney, Generates Courtroom Controversy, New York Times, June 20, 1971.
• Martin Garbus: Defender of the Damned, Harper’s Bazaar, Betsy L. Freund, January 1972.
• Don Quixote in Courtroom, The Baltimore Sun, July 25, 1971.

Notable Praise of Garbus' works

• "A wise and courageous lawyer, with long experience in our courts, turns his lucid mind and eloquent pen to our judicial system." – Alan Dershowitz
• “An ardent defender of our freedom, Martin Garbus reminds us that the Supreme Court directly affects the lives of all Americans.” – Senator Edward M. Kennedy
• “In Tough Talk, we see a legitimate, peerless champion carrying the banner of the First Amendment. What a joy!” – Mario Cuomo
• Labor leader Cesar Chavez commended Ready for the Defense as "an important book for all who truly want to understand how our legal system affects the poor and the accused."
• “Garbus’s powerful and poignant story of political demagoguery and media manipulation in southern Florida is a masterly portrait of the strengths and weakness of the American legal system.”- —Gay Talese
• "Marty Garbus, one of the nation's greatest trial lawyers, tells the tale of one of America's greatest show trials, of the Cuban Five--and of his efforts to achieve justice in a case thoroughly corrupted by politics and international intrigue." --David Cole, national legal director, ACLU, and author of Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed
• “This book reminds us why the world needs courageous lawyers who will challenge state abuse and fight for justice. Martin Garbus represents the best of the legal profession—brilliant and scholarly, principled and fearless, his fight for his clients is always his highest priority. An inspirational account.” -—Baroness Helena Kennedy QC

Appearances in films

• Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, directed by Liz Garbus
• The American Ruling Class written by Lewis Lapham
• This Film Is Not Yet Rated directed by Kirby Dick discussing the Motion Picture Association film code
• Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth directed by Robert Weide
• The First Amendment Project: No Joking, directed and written by Bob Balaban
• Frankie and Johnny, produced by Paramount, directed by Garry Marshall
• Dear God, Produced by Paramount, directed by Garry Marshall
• "American Masters, Biography of Philip Roth" 2013