Arthur Kinoy

Arthur Kinoy, one of the lawyers for the Chicago Seven and a founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, long a force in the civil rights movement, died Sept. 19 at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 82.

In 1969, Mr. Kinoy joined William M. Kunstler and Leonard I. Weinglass in defending prominent antiwar activists on charges that they had conspired to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The seven, including Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger and Tom Hayden, were all found guilty, but the verdicts were overturned on appeal.

Mr. Kinoy was involved with many other controversial cases and clients, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for whom he filed the last appeal of their death sentence, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem congressman, in his fight against expulsion from Congress.

Mr. Kinoy, who retired in 1991 from Rutgers University, was active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ' 60s and in representing witnesses called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1966, when he was representing student antiwar leaders before the committee, the acting chairman ordered him arrested for trying to argue a point of law with its members, and had him forcibly removed from the hearing room by three marshals. But his subsequent conviction on a charge of disorderly conduct was overturned on appeal.

Mr. Kinoy was involved in a number of landmark legal verdicts. In 1965 he successfully argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister before the Supreme Court, which empowered federal district judges to stop enforcement of laws that had " a chilling effect " on free speech.

In a subsequent case, Dombrowski v. Senator Eastland, he established that the counsel of the Senate Internal Security Committee was not immune from suits for violations of citizens ' civil rights.

In 1969, Mr. Kinoy convinced the Supreme Court that the expulsion of Powell from the House of Representatives on charges of misuse of public funds was unconstitutional. The congressman was eventually allowed to keep his seat, though he was stripped of his seniority.

In 1972, the Supreme Court upheld his contention that President Richard Nixon had no " inherent power " to wiretap domestic political organizations.

Mr. Kinoy was one of the lawyers defending the Rosenbergs at their trial on atomic espionage charges in 1951. Two years later, he made a last attempt before a federal appeals court to prevent their execution.

Arthur Kinoy was born in New York on Sept. 29, 1920, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1941. In World War II he served with the Army in North Africa and Italy. He then entered Columbia Law School, where he was executive editor of The Law Review and graduated in 1947.

In 1966, he helped found the Center for Constitutional Rights with a group of lawyers whose civil rights work in Mississippi had convinced them of the need for a new legal center dedicated to using the law to advance human rights and fight oppression in many areas.

Mr. Kinoy ' s first wife, the former Susan Knopf, died in 1999. He is survived by his second wife, Barbara Webster, and the children of his first marriage: Joanne, of Oak Park, Ill., and Peter, of Brooklyn.