NLG Chicagos Annual Celebration 2025

Last year, our annual event was rained out but we're back this year with a plan in place so that we can move forward, rain or shine! Join us on May 29th at Haymarket House for NLG Chicago's annual celebration. Help us lift up the work of Chicago's legal community to support our city's movements for social justice and honor Andy Thayer with the Arthur Kinoy People's Law Award and Rifqa Falaneh with the Trailblazer awards!

2024 was a busy year for NLG Chicago. Since the most recent bombing of Gaza began in October of 2023, our chapter has dispatched legal observers to more than 250 protests and provided free criminal defense to more than 550 people arrested at demonstrations. Simultaneously, we successfully coordinated legal support networks for protests of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Celebrate these efforts and help ensure our chapter has the resources we need to continue to support Chicago’s social justice movements in 2025!

Come raise a glass and break bread with Chicago's movement lawyers!

Accessibility: In order to advocate for disability justice and accessibility for all, we are planning to host this event outdoors to help stop the spread of COVID. If weather does not cooperate, we will have tents for our outdoor space and will open up Haymarket's indoor space where we'll require masks, keep windows open, and run several air purifiers. Haymarket House is ADA accessible.

Learn more about hour honorees:

This year’s Arthur Kinoy People’s Law Awardee Andy Thayer was once described as “a gigantic pain in the butt for law enforcement” by a retired Chicago Police Deputy Commander in a 2012 Sun-Times profile. For decades, Andy has been a mainstay of Chicago’s social justice movement, organizing campaigns and supporting young activists, all while serving as Loevy + Loevy’s office manager since 2003. As co-founder of the multi-issue, LGBTQ Gay Liberation Network, he has long worked to provide an intersectional voice within the LGBTQ community, helping spearhead the fight for equal marriage rights in Illinois years before “mainstream” activists joined the fight. He has focused on raising issues not popular with corporate gay activists such as support for Chelsea Manning, solidarity with Palestinians, opposition to gentrification, and opposing United States’ many wars.

NLG Chicago is also excited to honor Rifqa Falaneh with the Trailblazer Award. Throughout 2024, our Mass Defense Committee has worked with Rifqa to support students targeted by their universities for activism in support of Palestine. She is the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal where she challenges the censorship, surveillance, and suppression of advocates for Palestinian liberation. She is the founder of Bar None at UIUC Law, a civil rights organization dedicated to uplifting the legal struggles of marginalized communities. In the summer of 2022, Rifqa was an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights where she worked on Palestine solidarity cases, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and research on aiding and abetting a tort in New York for international crimes. She previously served as President of SJP DePaul and helped re-establish SJP Chicago in 2019.

Host or Publisher National Lawyers Guild of Chicago