Our annual #Law4ThePeople Awards Celebration took place on Tuesday, December 5th. The National Lawyers Guild honored members and allies for their extraordinary commitment to our mission of human rights and the rights of ecosystems over property interests.

We presented the 2023 #Law4thePeople Award to Community Movement Builders, a member-based collective of black people creating sustainable, self-determining communities through cooperative economic advancement and collective community organizing, for their extraordinary work in the struggle for justice and liberation. We also honored Armen Merjian, one of the nation’s leading HIV/AIDS and civil rights attorneys, with the Ernie Goodman Award for his extraordinary commitment to human and civil rights. Charlie McKeown received the C.B. King Award for his leadership as an NLG student at University of Georgia School of Law.

This year, we renamed the Legal Worker Award to pay tribute to Karen Jo Koonan (1945-2023), NLG’s first legal worker president, who embodied the political and legal leadership which made the NLG the movement resource it is today and presented the award to Jess Fuller for her extraordinary legal work building defendant-centered strategies to combat state repression. The NLG National Immigration Project joined us to honor the Carol Weiss King and Daniel Levy Award recipients.

You can read more about the honorees in the 2023 Tribute Journal and congratulate them by making a donation in their honor.

Thank you for showing up to reinforce connections to the movements we serve and to help us recognize these incredible people who have devoted their work to the struggle for justice and liberation.