Famed Civil Rights Lawyer Subject of New Film

Wilmington, DEHuman rights and civil rights law, the cornerstone of democracy, was the battle cry for the late William Kunstler, a legendary lawyer who took on civil and human rights cases presenting impossible odds, defended the seemingly indefensible and represented unsavory violations of human rights law. Now Kunstler's daughters have made a telling documentary about their famous father.

The film opened in New York Friday. "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe is an intimate treatment of a man who was billed as 'the most hated and most loved lawyer in America,'" writes the New York Times.

A story by the Associated Press that ran on Saturday in the News Journal of Wilmington, DE, traces Kunstler's rise to fame as a radical activist back to his travels to the South to join the civil rights movement and the American Civil Liberties Union.

His clients included Dr. Martin Luther King and the Chicago Seven, the anti-war protesters who were arrested at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Kunstler himself was sentenced to more than 40 months in prison for contempt of court over his courtroom behavior.

At home, life was equally cyclonic for the maverick lawyer's daughters, who had to bear school playground taunts every time their father was in the news. Bullets came in the mail and a rock was once hurled through their living room window. Packages arrived that would require Kunstler to retreat to the basement to open, in case they contained explosive devices.

But Emily and Sarah knew that their father's civil rights work was important. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 and the government effectively abandoned its large population of African-Americans, the event spurred Emily, a filmmaker, and Sarah, a law school graduate who had vowed never to follow in her father's footsteps, to research and tell the story of their father's life.

The film celebrates William Kunstler's willingness to take up seemingly lost causes—and remarkably, to win.