Michael Meltsner

Last updated

Michael Meltsner (born 1937) is an American lawyer, the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews distinguished University Professor of law (and former dean) at Northeastern University School of Law and author. [1] [2] Meltsner was educated at Oberlin College and the Yale Law School.

Contents

As first assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund he served as counsel in many leading civil rights cases of the 1960s, including those that led to the integration of Southern hospitals and medical facilities, and a moratorium on capital punishment. He represented Mohammad Ali in the litigation that enabled his return to the boxing ring. [3]

In 1977, he joined with Felicia Kentridge and Arthur Chaskalson to help found South Africa’s Legal Resource Center, modeling it after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. [4]

Meltsner sits on the board of the Legal Action Center. [5] He is a winner of many awards including a Berlin American Academy prize Fellowship, [6] a Guggenheim Fellowship, [7] the Hugo Bedau Award for capital punishment scholarship [8] and an American Bar Association Silver Gabel media award. [9] [ failed verification ] In 2012 John Jay College (CUNY) conferred an Honorary Doctor of Laws calling him "the principal architect of the death penalty abolition movement in the United States." [10]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Hamilton Houston</span> African-American lawyer (1895–1950)

Charles Hamilton Houston was an American lawyer. He was the dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow laws, especially attacking segregation in schools and racial housing covenants. He earned the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund</span> Organization in New York, United States

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Greenberg</span> American lawyer and activist

Jack Greenberg was an American attorney and legal scholar. He was the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to 1984, succeeding Thurgood Marshall. He was involved in numerous crucial cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in public schools. In all, he argued 40 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won almost all of them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert L. Carter</span> American judge (1917–2012)

Robert Lee Carter was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hope Franklin</span> American historian (1915–2009)

John Hope Franklin was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Katzmann</span> American judge (1953–2021)

Robert Allen Katzmann was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He served as chief judge from September 1, 2013, to August 31, 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Feldman Barrett</span> American psychological scientist and neuroscientist

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Canadian-American psychologist. She is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science and co-directs the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. She has received both of the highest scientific honors in the field of psychology, the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science for 2025, and the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association for 2021, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Klare</span>

Karl E. Klare is a Matthews Distinguished University Professor of labor and employment law and legal theory at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Massachusetts, and the current coordinator of the International Network on Transformative Employment and Labor Law (INTELL). He has written and lectured extensively on labor and employment issues, and is a notable proponent of the critical legal studies movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Harcourt</span> American academic

Bernard E. Harcourt is an American critical theorist with a specialization in the area of punishment, surveillance, legal and political theory, and political economy. He also does pro-bono legal work on human rights issues.

William P. Quigley is a law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julius L. Chambers</span> American lawyer, civil rights leader and educator

Julius LeVonne Chambers was an American lawyer, civil rights leader and educator.

David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and professor of sociology at New York University, and an honorary professor at Edinburgh Law School.

The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) is a human rights organisation based in South Africa with offices in Johannesburg (including a Constitutional Litigation Unit), Cape Town, Durban and Grahamstown. It was founded in 1979 by a group of prominent South African lawyers, including Arthur Chaskalson, Felicia Kentridge, and Geoff Budlender, under the guidance of American civil rights lawyers Jack Greenberg and Michael Meltsner, then Director-Counsel and former First Assistant Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund respectively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Robert Ming</span> American lawyer and activist (1911–1973)

William Robert Ming Jr. was an American lawyer, attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and law professor at University of Chicago Law School and Howard University School of Law. He presided over the Freeman Field mutiny courts-martial involving the Tuskegee Airmen. He is best remembered for being a member of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation team and for working on a number of the important cases leading to Brown, the decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled de jure racial segregation a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

James Q. Whitman is an American lawyer and Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Risa L. Goluboff</span> American lawyer

Risa Lauren Goluboff is an American legal scholar who served as the 12th dean of the University of Virginia School of Law from 2016 to 2024, the first woman to hold the position. She is also the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law and a professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Richard P. Guy is an American attorney who was a justice of the Washington Supreme Court from 1989 to 2001, serving as chief justice from 1998 to 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franklin Zimring</span> American lawyer

Franklin E. Zimring is an American criminologist, law professor, and the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sherrilyn Ifill</span> American lawyer (born 1962)

Sherrilyn Ifill is an American lawyer and the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. She is a law professor and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was the Legal Defense Fund's seventh president since Thurgood Marshall founded the organization in 1940. Ifill is a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection. In 2021, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world on its annual Time 100 list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janai Nelson</span> American lawyer

Janai Nelson is an American lawyer, who currently serves as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF).

References