Lawyers: Prodigious Professor

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Unfolding Technique. Last summer Amsterdam led 30 law students through 250 counties in eleven Southern states to analyze a 25-year collection of 2,600 rape cases—a major study of Southern "dual justice." Last spring Amsterdam also produced a memorable 119-page article in the Penn law review on the "removal" of civil rights cases from state to federal courts. Indeed, Amsterdam is the leading scholar of that unfolding technique, one of the big developments in U.S. law. While honing dozens of Legal Defense Fund briefs, he is also writing a lengthy trial manual for all U.S. defense lawyers, to be distributed by the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute.

Amsterdam is not so much an advocate of more civil rights as he is a crack criminal lawyer seeking better protection of existing rights. The rights themselves have been won—from free expression in 1789 to equal voting in " 1965. And yet, he says, the American citizen may still be "arrested, jailed, fined under guise of bail and put to every risk and rancor of the criminal process if he expresses himself unpopularly." In the years ahead, Amsterdam intends to concentrate on making "the paper right a practical protection."