PRESIDENT of the enormously influential Centre for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner was not only a massively popular People’s Attorney but a self-proclaimed socialist, prolific author and expert organiser. As a result, he was an internationally recognised enemy of the US empire.

Born into a lower-middle class, progressive Jewish family from Cleveland, Ohio, in 1943, Ratner excelled as a student  and went on to teach law in his early twenties at Yale before eventually working  for Constance Baker Motley, the first-ever African-American woman appointed to the federal judiciary in the US.

Radicalised by the ongoing militancy of the civil rights movement, opposition to war in Vietnam and events around the Attica prison uprising of 1971, Ratner jettisoned a career within the liberal establishment and consciously devoted the rest of his life to working for those least powerful against those most. He lived up to Camus’s dictum that it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.