Vincent Hallinan (December 16, 1896 - October 2, 1992) was a lawyer born into a large immigrant Irish-Catholic family and raised in San Francisco and Petaluma, California. His father was a platform man on the California Street Cable Car^[1].

Trained by Jesuits in high school,^[2], Hallinan passed the California Bar at the age of 22 after student at University of California, Berkeley.

His early successes in court included personal injury actions against the powerful Market Street Railway Company which ran most of the trolley lines on the streets of San Francisco and was a subsidiary of northern California rail interests. The rail company also owned the system whereby jurors' lists were kept and consulted by an appointed jury commissioner, in Hallinan's time an official of the railway, and he fought against this sytem for years before state law made the voter rolls the sole source of jurors.

Hallinan's years as a lawyer led to his selection in 1949, with a partner Roy McInnis, to defend Harry Bridges of the ILWU on perjury charges arising from accusations that he had once been a Communist but had denied it.

After the trial, Hallinan spent six months in prison for a contempt citation during the high profile Bridges trial.

Hallinan ran for President of the United States in the 1952 election, as the candidate for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and was the third highest polling candidate in the election.

He and his wife Vivian were indicted on 14 counts of tax evasion. Vincent was convicted on five counts and was fined $622,000 and served to 18 months in federal prison in his second federal prison term, after he reported only 20% of his income from 1947 to 1950.^[3]Vivian was acquitted. He was subsequently disbarred by the State Bar of California.

In his 1963 autobiography, Hallinan claimed he was prosecuted by the IRS for his political views, and that the government did not differentiate between tax avoidance(legal) and tax evasion(illegal). Also in his autobiography he argued for prison reform, against laws forbidding private consensual sex, contraception and abortion, he argued in favor of medicalizing drug addiction and providing clean maintenance drugs to addicts, legalizing prostitution and against imperialism and American foreign policy. ^[4].

Vincent Hallinan is the father of famed San Francisco attorneys Patrick Hallinan and politician Terence Hallinan.