Legal career
Bright served as a legal services attorney with the Appalachian Research & Defense Fund from 1975 to 1976, a public defender with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia from 1976 to 1979, and director of a law school clinical program in Washington, D.C., from 1979 to 1982.
He has represented people facing the death penalty at trials and on appeals, and prisoners in challenges to inhumane conditions and practices; written essays and articles on the right to counsel, racial discrimination in the criminal legal system, judicial independence, and other topics, which have been published in scholarly publications, books, magazines and newspapers; and testified before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. [4]
In addition to Yale and Georgetown, he has also taught at the law schools at Harvard University, University of Chicago, Emory University, University of Georgia, Georgia State University Law School, University of Tennessee, Northeastern University, American University, and other universities.
The Fulton County Daily Report named Bright as 'Agitator (and Newsmaker) of the Year' [5] in 2003 for his contribution to bringing about creation of a public defender system in Georgia by bringing lawsuits and issuing reports that led to the state legislature's passage of the Georgia Indigent Defense Act. [6]
Bright has argued before the Supreme Court in the cases of McWilliams v. Dunn (2017), Foster v. Chatman (2016), Snyder v. Louisiana (2008), and Amadeo v. Zant (1988). [7] The Supreme Court ruled in favor of his clients in each case, finding racial discrimination in jury selection in the cases of Foster, Snyder and Amadeo, and the denial of funds for an crucial expert witness that denied McWilliams a fair trial.
Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires U.S. states to provide attorneys to criminal defendants who are unable to afford their own. The case extended the right to counsel, which had been found under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to impose requirements on the federal government, by imposing those requirements upon the states as well.
Harold Andrew Blackmun was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. Appointed by President Richard Nixon, Blackmun ultimately became one of the most liberal justices on the Court. He is best known as the author of the Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), was a landmark criminal case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It was a per curiam decision. Five justices each wrote separately in support of the decision. Although the justices did not rule that the death penalty was unconstitutional, the Furman decision invalidated the death sentences of nearly 700 people. The decision mandated a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. This case resulted in a de facto moratorium of capital punishment throughout the United States. Dozens of states rewrote their death penalty laws, most of which were upheld in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia.
Georgetown University Law Center is the law school of Georgetown University, a private research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It was established in 1870 and is the largest law school in the United States by enrollment, with over 2,000 students. It frequently receives the most full-time applications of any law school in the United States. Georgetown is considered part of the T14, an unofficial designation in the legal community of the best 14 law schools in the United States.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
In United States law, ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) is a claim raised by a convicted criminal defendant asserting that the defendant's legal counsel performed so ineffectively that it deprived the defendant of the constitutional right guaranteed by the Assistance of Counsel Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ineffectiveness claims may only be brought where the defendant had the right to counsel, ordinarily during the critical stages of a prosecution.
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.
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.
Mark Victor Tushnet is an American legal scholar. He specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law, and is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Tushnet is identified with the critical legal studies movement.
Charles James Ogletree Jr. was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He was also the author of books on legal topics.
David D. Cole is the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Before joining the ACLU in July 2016, Cole was the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center from March 2014 through December 2016. He has published in various legal fields including constitutional law, national security, criminal justice, civil rights, and law and literature. Cole has litigated several significant First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, as well a number of influential cases concerning civil rights and national security. He is also a legal correspondent to several mainstream media outlets and publications.
Nancy Gertner is a former United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She assumed senior status on May 22, 2011, and retired outright from the federal bench on September 1, 2011. She is now a professor of practice at Harvard Law School.
The Southern Center for Human Rights is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to enforcing the civil and human rights of people in the criminal justice system in the South. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, it has won cases in several states in the southeastern United States, including Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina.
Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, and law professor at New York University School of Law, and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, he has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole.
John R. Kramer served as the 19th dean of the Tulane University Law School from 1986 to 1996, and previous to that was an associate dean at Georgetown University. At Tulane he started a law clinic to serve low-income people in New Orleans and made Tulane the first law school in the United States to require a specific number of community service hours for graduation. Under his leadership, African American students came to constitute a greater percentage of the law school student body than in any other non-historically black law school.
Amy Bach is an American a journalist, attorney, and author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, for which she won the 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Measures for Justice, a nonprofit that collects and publishes county-level criminal justice performance data. She founded the organization after she published her book.
Abbe Lyn Smith is an American criminal defense attorney and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Smith is Director of the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Co-Director of the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship Program.
Vida B. Johnson is an American criminal defense attorney and associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Johnson works in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Criminal Justice Clinic, and supervises attorneys in the E. Barrett Prettyman Post-Graduate Fellowship Program. Johnson regularly writes in the area of criminal law and procedure.
Romeo Marcus Williams was an American civil rights attorney who organized large-scale student protests against segregation in Marshall, Texas. He was also a junior partner of Dallas, Texas civil rights attorney, William J. Durham, who served as lead counsel on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, Sweatt v. Painter, and Smith v. Allwright.
