Ira Gollobin

Who was Ira Gollobin?

Ira Gollobin was a renowned civil rights and immigration attorney who was involved for over seven decades in many high profile civil liberties, immigration, and extradition cases. Gollobin wrote extensively on the civil liberties and civil rights of both the native- and foreign-born. He left a legacy of principled advocacy. Gollobin was born in Newark, New Jersey to first generation immigration parents from Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine, who had arrived as infants to the United States in 1885.

Gollobin attended the City College of City University of New York in the late 1920s and 1930s where he developed two lifelong interests: Latin and law, and was greatly influenced by one of his professors, the eminent Morris Raphael Cohen. While at CCNY he enrolled in Fordham Law School where he received his LL.B. degree and passed the New York Bar Examination in June 1933. Ira Gollobin was a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild where he was a strong force behind their earliest immigration work. He served first as associate counsel from 1936-1966 for the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born and then as General Counsel from 1967-1982 where his approach to immigration issues had both legal and political dimensions. In 1938, Gollobin met Carol Weiss King, another founding member of the National Lawyers Guild and the lead lawyer for the ACPFB. He assisted the League of American Writers from 1937-1938 to successfully get a number of anti-Nazi German writers admitted to the United States and from 1938 through 1940 helped refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Gollobin was counsel to the Transport Workers Union of America thereby securing citizenship for almost 1,500 subway workers. He continued citizenship matters for the Greater New York Industrial Union Council from 1940-1942. Drafted into the U.S. Army in November, 1942 as a Staff Sergeant, Ira Gollobin was assigned to the Judge Advocate General Staff Section in the Philippines. In January 1946 he was one of the principal organizers of a GI demobilization demonstration movement in Manila, and was honorably discharged in March, 1946. [Nature, Society and Thought, vol. 15, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–39 by Erwin Marquit. Gollobin used the pseudonym John David.] http://www.jstor.org/pss/3022995