Dombrowski v. Pfister
1965 United States Supreme Court case
Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U.S. 479 (1965), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case brought forth by Dr. James Dombrowski along with William Kunstler, founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, against the governor of Louisiana, law enforcement officers, and the chairperson of the state's Legislative Joint Committee on Un-American Activities for prosecuting or threatening to prosecute his organization under several state subversion statutes.
Background
James A. Dombrowski was executive director of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), a civil rights advocacy group that promoted desegregation and African-American voting rights. State officials in Louisiana declared the SCEF a subversive or communist-front organization whose members were violating the Louisiana Subversive Activities and Communist Front Control Law. Louisiana officials seized and searched Dombrowski's and two lawyers’ papers and indicted them.
Dombrowski alleged that members of his organization, which consisted of a group of Southern liberals dedicated to fighting for civil rights for Blacks in the South, were subjected to continuous harassment, including arrests without intent to prosecute, and seizures of necessary internal documents. Furthermore, the State was threatening to use anti-subversion statutes to prosecute the organization.
The case was brought forth by Dombrowski after he was arrested and his offices were raided by authorities in October 1963. Dombrowski demanded all seized materials to be returned to him and $500,000 be paid in damages resulting from the arrest and search-and-seizure.
“Dombrowski v. Pfister” enters the record as 1965 United States Supreme Court case. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dombrowski, Pfister and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5289987. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dombrowski v. Pfister” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.