Walter Pollak

His best known cases involved the defense before the Supreme Court of Communist Benjamin Gitlow and the Scottsboro Boys.

Walter Pollak attended DeWitt Clinton High School and then Columbia University in New York City.

[1][2] During the 1920s, according to Max Lowenthal, Pollak was part of a "loose partnership" of radical attorneys that included Joseph R. Brodsky, Swinburne Hale, Walter Nelles, Isaac Shorr, Carol Weiss King, and King's brother-in-law Carl Stern.

[4][5][6][7][8] In 1925, on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he argued his first case before the United States Supreme Court, Gitlow v. New York, defending Communist Party member Benjamin Gitlow against a conviction for "advocacy of criminal anarchy."

The court upheld Gitlow's conviction but importantly recognized that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment incorporated and thus protected fundamental provisions of the Bill of Rights, including the freedom of speech.