Philip Hirschkop
[1] The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, and on April 10, 1967, Hirschkop and Cohen were permitted to share the oral argument for the Lovings.
[4] Other clients have included Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown, Norman Mailer, the American Nazi Party, PETA, and "numerous anti-war protesters during the 1960s and 1970s."
In Hightstown, he made friends with a number of African American migrant workers who briefly lived there as they passed through town while working in the potato fields, often under terrible conditions.
[8] Immediately after high school, at the age of eighteen, Hirschkop joined the Army as a Green Beret in the 77th Special Forces Air Group as a paratrooper.
[7] While still in law school at Georgetown, he attended a party with a number of African-American civil rights lawyers assembled by President Kennedy and was greatly influenced.
[15][16][17] After the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Mildred wrote Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, inquiring if the law could allow her and her husband to live in Virginia.
The decision validated that interracial marriage bans were unconstitutional and their existence in some states and not others denied the couple equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.
In a highly controversial and somewhat ironic case considering his religion, he defended the right of American Nazi Party activist George Lincoln Rockwell, as a veteran, to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, winning the decision.
He initially declined the case, fully aware of the activities and beliefs of the American Nazi Party, but his associates at the ACLU encouraged him to take it to defend free speech, regardless of its content.
[23] In 1968 he defended Norman Mailer, distinguished author, against charges of disorderly conduct when he crossed a police line in a Vietnam war demonstration at the Pentagon in October 1967.
[5] In 1968, Hirschkop represented an amicus party in a U.S. Supreme Court case that declared unconstitutional an Arkansas law that prohibited teachers, in state schools, from teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.
In 1973 he defended Susan Cohen, a deposed Virginia teacher, in a trial that questioned the "constitutionality of regulations forcing pregnant women to quit their jobs".
[28] In 1974 he successfully argued the case, Cohen v. Chesterfield County before the Supreme Court which abolished the existing teacher leave policies for pregnant woman.
[7] In August 1990, he was involved in a controversial appeal in which his client PETA, and other animal rights groups were assessed two million dollars in damages on counts of invasion of privacy and defamation of character against a Las Vegas showman who used pet orangutans in his act at the Stardust Hotel.
Hirschkop claimed that Bobby Berosini, the showman, had been secretly filmed striking the orangutans in his act, and that he and the hotel should not retain the damage awards they had received for defamation of character in their suit against the animal rights groups.
