After passing the
bar examination, Nelles entered private legal practice.
Law practice During World War I, Nelles was a partner in the law firm of
Hale, Nelles &
Shorr. Nelles defended Communist Party co-founder
Benjamin Gitlow for half a decade. In 1920, Nelles and Murray C. Bernay served of counsel to defend Gitlow in
People vs. Gitlow on behalf of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (soon renamed the
American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU), then Nelles and Charles Recht on appeal. Throughout the 1920s, Nelles participated in a loose partnership of left-wing attorneys, including
Joseph R. Brodsky,
Swinburne Hale,
Carol Weiss King, and
Isaac Shorr. The firm support legal investigations published in the 67-page
Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice by the National Popular Government League (NGPL); Swinburne Hale did a majority of the work on the report. following the entry of the United States into
World War I in April 1917 Nelles was persuaded by his old college classmate
Roger Baldwin to leave his practice to become house counsel for the fledgling
National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB) of the
American Union Against Militarism that Baldwin had helped launch. This organization, based in
New York City, would eventually emerge as the
American Civil Liberties Union. The Civil Liberties Bureau in its first years dealt primarily with cases involving
conscientious objectors and political opponents of the war who faced charges under the so-called
Espionage Act. Among those high-profile cases which Nelles handled included the trial of the American Socialist Society and its
Rand School of Social Science and the trial of
Max Eastman and his publication,
The Masses. The raid was based upon invalid
search warrants. Nelles and Baldwin were joined in the main office of the National Civil Liberties Bureau by
Albert DeSilver, a lawyer who left private practice to work full-time on the defense of civil liberties in the courts. The troika guided the activities of the NCLB and the successor ACLU in its earliest years. Roger Baldwin later fondly recalled their partnership: We made a team which was never after equalled in the American Civil Liberties Union. DeSilver contributed the quick unerring judgment, with a gay and easy approach to tough problems; Nelles, the reflective opinions of a studious lawyer sometimes aroused by hot indignations; and I, the techniques of the
social case worker, an organizer and a publicity man for such limited publicity as was open to us. The three men "loved each other," Lucille B. Milner, secretary of the NCLB remembered. Nelles later memorialized his fallen colleague by writing his biography, published by
W.W. Norton & Co. in 1940.
Academic career Nelles later served on the faculty of
Yale Law School where he often taught courses on the history of labor
injunctions. ==Personal life and death==