The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States. The group was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association (ABA) in protest of that organization's exclusionary membership practices and conservative political orientation.We were the first US bar association to allow the admission of minorities to their ranks.

We are dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system… to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests."