Suddenly, he spots a man headed away from the courthouse on foot. "Now, here's a guy going, you see, so what we do is, we see where he goes," he says. But Kunstler isn't about to wait - not when there's another option. ''Want a lift to your car?" he calls out. "You got a good spot?"
The man, evidently unimpressed or ignorant of the fact that he is conversing with the man Vanity Fair once called "The Most Hated Lawyer in America," answers dryly: "I think it'll be just the one you're looking for."
Kunstler nabs the parking space.
Rushing toward the courthouse, he is greeted sarcastically by his pony- tailed partner Ron Kuby, then ambushed by a young woman. She hands him a letter about a case she wants him to handle. "She's a nut," Kuby explains. ''But that doesn't distinguish her from the rest of our clientele."
It wasn't always thus: During the last three decades, Kunstler, now a fiercely energetic 75, has defended the entire pantheon of heroes of the American left, from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abbie Hoffman to American Indian activist Leonard Peltier.
His recently published autobiography, My Life as a Radical Lawyer (Birch Lane Press, $22.50), makes it clear just how ubiquitous - and unapologetic - he has been. From Attica to Wounded Knee, he seems to pop up, Forrest Gump- like, in the midst of nearly every political conflagration - just in time to grab the spotlight and espouse his disdain for the system he still works within.
The oft-repeated charge that he has become an anachronism hardly seems to faze him.
"Anachronism?" he says mildly. "That's proved not to be so. I was afraid that (I'd) just be an aging hippie. But it's turned out not to be that. . . . I've been lucky to find a lot of areas in which to fight, a lot of battlefields."
