“We Need More People’s Lawyers in the Gay Community”: Law Students and the Struggle for LGBT Rights in the 1970s

In the 1970s, as openly gay and lesbian students began to enter law schools, they called for changes to curriculum, promoted law school attendance within LGBT communities, created student organizations on campus, and formed alliances with each other across multiple institutions. While such efforts created opportunities for them to connect with each other as future lawyers, they also became vehicles to help meet unmet legal needs of local LGBT communities. Working with established local attorneys and through such organizations as the National Lawyers Guild, these projects gave law students real world experience--in legal services--engaging such issues as police harassment, employment discrimination, and child custody. This paper takes a closer look at the little known history of such student organizing in law schools and their work in local communities, assessing the relationship of that law student organizing to the wider LGBT movement of the period.