Walter Pollak


Walter Pollak was a 20th-century American civil liberties lawyer, who worked with other important, radical lawyers in the 1920s and 1930s, most famously to defend Communist Benjamin Gitlow before the Supreme Court and the Scottsboro Boys.

Background

Walter Heilprin Pollak was born on June 4, 1887, in Summit, New Jersey to Gustav Pollak and Celia Heilprin in a family of "bookish, nonreligious Jews" who had come to the States in the 1850s. His father was an editor and writer for The Nation magazine. Walter Pollak attended DeWitt Clinton High School and then Columbia University in New York City. In 1907, he graduated from Harvard University and in 1910 from Harvard Law School.

Career

Pollak first joined the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell but within two years had moved to Simpson, Warren and Cardozo, where he started a lifelong friendship with Benjamin N. Cardozo. Pollak stayed on, and the firm eventually became Engelhard, Pollak, Pitcher, Stern and Clarke.
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.
in 1925
In 1925, on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, he argued his first case before the United States Supreme Court in Gitlow v. New York, defending Communist Party member Benjamin Gitlow against his 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.
In the early 1930s, on behalf of International Labor Defense, Pollak joined the defense team of the Scottsboro Boys with Joseph R. Brodsky. He took an active part in framing the appeals in Powell v. Alabama, as well as Norris v. Alabama and Patterson v. Alabama, the latter which he argued with the support of the ACLU.
In 1937, early in the Great Depression, the firm dissolved. Pollak became of counsel to Cohen, Cole, Weiss, and Wharton.

Personal and death

Pollak was the father of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Louis Heilprin Pollak, who had served as dean of both Yale Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
He was a close friend of law professor Zechariah Chafee Jr..
Pollak died age 53 on October 2, 1940, of a heart attack.

External sources