John T. McTernan, 94; Lawyer Fought to Protect Civil Rights

John T. McTernan, a highly regarded Los Angeles civil rights lawyer who fought many landmark civil liberties and labor cases, including seven before the U.S. Supreme Court, has died. He was 94.

McTernan died in his sleep last Monday at his home in Santa Monica, his family said.

During his nearly 50-year partnership with the late Ben Margolis, McTernan and the equally esteemed Margolis were recognized for making significant contributions to the protection of civil liberties and constitutional rights.

With their firm representing a large number of labor unions in Southern California in the 1940s, McTernan and Margolis jointly worked on a case in which they successfully argued to the California Supreme Court that it was unlawful to segregate blacks into auxiliary unions in which they were denied significant benefits of union membership.

They also worked on cases involving racially restrictive housing covenants.

One celebrated 1948 case involved an African American Los Angeles family who had built their own house but were prevented from occupying it by a white property owners association. McTernan conducted successful litigation that thwarted that effort.

McTernan and Margolis, who were charter members of the progressive National Lawyers Guild, represented numerous people who had applied for admission to the California bar but whose fitness was questioned because of their political beliefs or activities.

Margolis gained renown as one of the principal defenders of the Hollywood 10, who were imprisoned for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.

At the same time, McTernan was heavily involved in representing others summoned before the House committee and its state counterparts in California and Washington. McTernan also represented those who were blacklisted or lost jobs because of their resistance to those committees.

In 1950, three Communist Party leaders in western Pennsylvania were charged with violating the state’s sedition law, which was similar to the federal Smith Act of 1940. The law made it a crime to “knowingly or willfully” advocate or abet the violent overthrow of the government or to belong to any group that encouraged such action.

When the three men were unable to obtain local counsel, McTernan spent three months defending them.

The men were sentenced to prison for 20 years. But as a result of McTernan’s groundbreaking legal work, the state act was declared unconstitutional and the convictions were reversed.

During the Cold War, McTernan litigated repeatedly before the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of government action, including the legitimacy of requiring employees to take loyalty oaths.

One of McTernan’s most important cases, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 1957, established the rule that a defendant has the right to be informed of the evidence the government says it has gained from informers and to examine and challenge that evidence.

“This is an extraordinarily important principle in a democracy -- that the accused be able to confront the evidence that the government says it has against them, so that we do not have a system of secret tribunals,” Barbara Hadsell, a Pasadena civil rights lawyer who worked with McTernan for nearly 20 years, told The Times last week.

McTernan also contributed his legal talents to farmworker causes and school integration cases. And in representing radical Angela Davis, a UCLA faculty member whose Communist Party membership led to her dismissal by the University of California Board of Regents in 1969, he succeeded in winning her reinstatement.

“John was a real giant of the profession,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, who worked with McTernan on various civil liberty cases.

Rosenbaum said that McTernan, along with Margolis and attorneys Charles Katz and Robert Kenny, “almost single-handedly held the 1st Amendment together against the communist witch-hunt attacks.”

“They really displayed not only uncommon skill as lawyers but selfless courage in the face of personal and professional attacks of a ferocity that we can only imagine today,” he said.

Hadsell said McTernan never ran away from a battle.

“No matter how unpopular the side of the fight he was taking, if he believed it was just and right he just stood there and fought it out -- and often at great personal loss,” she said.

Describing McTernan as a tall, patrician-looking man who was always elegantly dressed, Hadsell said he “talked in a very measured way and always interspersed his conversations with Irish witticisms.”

Added Rosenbaum: “John was a mentor in word and in deed to me and to scores of civil liberties and civil rights attorneys in California and throughout the country by virtue of his work.”

McTernan was born in 1910 in White Plains, N.Y., and graduated from Amherst College in 1931 and Columbia Law School in 1934. Influenced by popular American socialists of the 1920s and ‘30s, he became sympathetic to various left-wing movements.

In a 2000 interview with the Daily Journal, the Los Angeles-based legal newspaper, McTernan said he had been a member of the Communist Party for a few years but later became disenchanted with its ideology and blamed himself for not having looked closely enough at the repressive and deadly nature of the Soviet government.

But, he said in the interview, “I’m still what I would call a left-winger.”

McTernan began his law career in 1934 as an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, and he soon became a trial attorney assigned to major cases around the country. He was promoted to regional chief counsel for the board’s Northern California office in 1938 and held that position until 1942.

Before joining Margolis’ Los Angeles law firm in 1944, he served a year as regional counsel for the Office of Price Administration in San Francisco.

Margolis, who died in 1999, once summarized McTernan’s work as a people’s lawyer by saying that he “sought to infuse the legal system with principles that would lend support to the struggle for human rights of workers, intellectuals, women, ethnic and other minorities -- in short to the masses of people who had suffered the use of law to protect property rights against human rights.”

McTernan, who retired from active practice in 1992, served on the board of directors of both the national ACLU and the ACLU of Southern California.

In his later years, he served on the Arbitration Panel for the Superior Court in Los Angeles County.

McTernan is survived by his wife of 53 years, Anne; daughters Kathleen, Deborah and Karla; son Garrett; a granddaughter; and a great-grandson.

Services are pending.