User:Barry Willdorf

Barry S. Willdorf was born in New York City on March 6, 1945 and grew up in Malden and Gloucester, MA. He graduated from Colby College in 1966 with a B.A. in History and from Columbia Law School in 1969 receiving a J.D. Mr. Willdorf also attended the University of Manchester. He began his legal career as an investigator and defense counsel for the New York Legal Aid Society. He is admitted to practice in New York and California as well as several federal jurisdictions and the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1970, he founded the Southern California Military Law Project, one of a handful of legal defense organizations run by civilians dedicated to defending U.S. service personal charged with violations of military law that involved opposition to the Vietnam War and/or racial discrimination. Mr. Willdorf continued representing members of the armed forces until 1975. During that time, he co-authored a legal self-help book for military service personnel: Turning the Regs Around. In 2001, Mr. Willdorf published a semi-autobiographical novel, Bring the War Home! fictionalizing his experiences representing anti-war Marines at Camp Pendleton, CA in 1970 and 1971.

Mr. Willdorf has an AV rating by Martindale and Hubbell. During a legal career spanning four decades, he has been a trial counsel in more than 100 trials, including defending clients charged with serious felonies. He has represented hundreds of victims of securities and real estate fraud. In 2005, Mr. Willdorf was named “Attorney of the Year” by the San Francisco AIDS Legal Referral Panel. His legal publishing credits include co-authoring How To Pass the LSATs, Monarch Press, 1970, authoring a chapter in Matthew Bender, California Forms of Jury Instructions, relating to real estate brokers, appraisers and notaries and acting as a contributing editor for Matthew Bender’s, Trial Master series. He has also published several shorter works on the Second Amendment.

His recent work of historical fiction, The Flight of the Sorceress, (Wild Child Publishing, 2010) is set during of the last years of the Roman Empire, when the newly-empowered Roman Catholic Church waged religious war against women, pagans, dissenters and “heretics.” The Flight of the Sorceress recounts the murder of Hypatia, renowned mathematician and the last librarian of Alexandria, and St. Augustine’s vendetta against Pelagius, the Celtic Christian who was declared a heretic in 417 A.D. because of his opposition to the doctrine of Original Sin. The novel also describes the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria in 415 A.D. (perhaps the first modern-style pogrom.) as well as the 411 A.D. heresy show trial conducted under the auspices of St. Augustine in Carthage that drove the Donatist Christians (nearly half of the church membership and half of its bishops.) out of the church. Flight of the Sorceress: The Blog

Burning Questions, the first part of Mr. Willdorf’s “1970s Trilogy” has just been published (August 2011) by Whiskey Creek Press. 1970s Trilogy

Barry Willdorf's website is A Gauche Press