Harry Weinberger (1888–1944) was an American lawyer. He was a litigator for many prominent civil liberties causes in the early twentieth century.
Born into a family of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants in New York City, Weinberger worked as a night stenographer to finance his education. He graduated from the New York University Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1908.
Weinberger took a particular interest in people he believed had been deprived of their civil liberties. He defended many aliens, immigrants, and radicals, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Later in his career, he developed an expertise in copyright law, representing such writers as the playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Weinberger’s works include The Liberty of the Press (1936) and A Rebel’s Interrupted Autobiography (1942.) Yale University hosts the Harry Weinberger Papers 1915–43.
READ: Works by Harry Weinberger
The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought.
—Harry Weinberger
Topics: Mistakes, Protest, Right, Rightness
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