Opinion ID: 1718207
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Defendant's Employment

Text: The plaintiff American Civil Liberties Union, Eastern Missouri (ACLU/EM), is a not-for-profit membership association. Its purposes include nurturing civil liberties and promoting or opposing legislation affecting civil liberties. [2] ACLU/EM fosters and finances litigation in pursuit of its civil liberties objectives, as it conceives them. Cases are often filed on behalf of individual clients under statutes passed pursuant to the enabling provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. These statutes provide remedies to implement the rights guaranteed by that amendment, thereby making use of our honored adversary process in the pursuit of constitutional and statutory rights. It makes no difference that some might deem this goal unworthy, the underlying statutes unwise, or the aims of a particular lawsuit trifling or pestiferous. Those who think they have rights are entitled to their day in court. Those in opposition may be heard in the same forum. That is the way our legal system works. Prior to 1982 ACLU/EM had no full time lawyer on its payroll. In that year the defendant, a recent graduate of a leading law school, was hired as its first full-time staff counsel at a salary comparable to the prevailing rate for new lawyers in the St. Louis area. He understood from the beginning of his employment that he was not to receive fees from litigants in the cases that he handled in litigation sponsored by his employer and that any court awards of attorneys' fees on account of his services were to be paid over to ACLU/EM. He continued in this employment until 1985.