Di Suvero responded that the NECLC had learned the importance of avoiding identification with a single cause and therefore looked for cases involving students, prisoners, and the poor.
[6] Its first landmark case was Kent v. Dulles (1958), argued by Leonard Boudin, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the right to travel may not be restricted without due process.
In 1965, it won a decision that the McCarran Act's requirement that members of the Communist Party register with the U.S. government as agents of a foreign power violated the Fifth Amendment of the U.S.
[4] In 1965, it won Corliss Lamont's challenge to a law requiring those who wished to receive Communist publications from foreign countries though the U.S. mail to file a request with the Post Office.
[1] It hoped to attract ACLU members dissatisfied with that organization's less radical posture, notably its hesitant approach to advocacy in cases involving the draft and anti-war protests.
[1] In March 1976, NECLC represented James Peck, a young Freedom Rider who had been beaten unconscious by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961.
[12][13] In June 1990, the NECLC file suit against the Department of the Treasury which was continuing to ban the importation of paintings, drawings and sculpture from Cuba, despite exemptions provided for "informational materials" in the Free Trade in Ideas Act of 1988.
[18] On December 13, 1963, the NECLC presented Bob Dylan its Tom Paine Award for Civil Rights efforts at the Hotel Americana in New York City.