Labor attorney Harriet Bouslog defended — often at no charge — the rights of underdog clients and activists as they struggled to organize.
Bouslog was one of only a handful of women attorneys when she was admitted to the Hawai'i bar in 1941. She was feisty, flamboyant and quickly became a champion of the working class in the 1940s and '50s.
One of her cases led to the abolition of the death penalty in Hawai'i. Her law license was suspended for a year in another case, but she fought to get it back, and her appeal was successful when she took it before the U.S. Supreme Court.
During World War II, Bouslog was hired to work for the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union in Washington, D.C. by its president, Harry Bridges.
But she returned to the Islands after the war and defended plantation workers who had been arrested while on strike. In 1946, she kept 400 sugar workers out of jail after they had been arrested for unlawful assembly.
Bouslog took up the case of John Palakiki and James E. Majors, who were scheduled for execution a week later. She won an 11th-hour stay. Palakiki and Majors, convicted of the 1948 murder of Theresa Wilder, received life sentences and eventually were paroled. The case was credited with helping to abolish Hawai'i's death penalty.
In 1952, Bouslog gave a speech on the Big Island criticizing the case against the "Hawai'i Seven" — a group of union activists arrested for conspiring to overthrow the government because of their "seditious" talk. Her criticism resulted in her license being suspended for a year. ILWU officials urged her to cut a deal to get her license reinstated, but Bouslog refused and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she won.
Bouslog died in 1998. She was 85.
