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.
The 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 and the most applied to, receiving more full-time applications than any other law school in the country.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is a leading United States civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Bruce Robert Jacob is a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Florida during the early 1960s. He represented Louie L. Wainwright, the Director of the Florida Division of Corrections, in the Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright, decided in March 1963, regarding the right to counsel of indigent defendants in non-capital felony cases in state courts. The attorney representing the Petitioner, Clarence Gideon, was Abe Fortas, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court. The previous 1942 Supreme Court case of Betts v. Brady required the appointment of counsel for an indigent defendant at state expense if there was a “special circumstance” present in the case which made it necessary for counsel to be provided for the defendant to receive a fair trial. For example, if the defendant was indigent and was extremely young, or lacked education or experience, was unfamiliar with court procedures, or if the charges against him were complex, the trial court was required under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to appoint counsel. Jacob argued against any extension of the defendant's right to counsel. The Court in Gideon overruled Betts and required state courts to appoint attorneys for defendants in all felony prosecutions.
Drew Saunders Days III was an American legal scholar who served as Solicitor General of the United States from 1993 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton. He also served as the first African American Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division in the Carter Administration from 1977 to 1980. He was the Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law at Yale Law School, assuming that post in 1992, and joining the Yale Law faculty in 1981. From 1997 to 2011, he headed the Supreme Court and appellate practice at Morrison & Foerster LLP and was of counsel at the firm's Washington, D.C. office until his retirement from the firm in December, 2011. He earned his Juris Doctor degree at Yale Law School in 1966. He was admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court, and in the states of Illinois and New York.
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.
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.
William Michael Treanor is an attorney and legal scholar. He is the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, the former dean of Fordham University School of Law, and an expert on constitutional law, having twice been cited in Supreme Court opinions. He continues to teach as a professor. Treanor held several high-profile government positions and he is an advocate of civil service. His teaching and work evidence Treanor's commitment to his philosophy of a complete legal education: "Intellectual excellence, the craft of lawyering, and dedication to public service."
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.
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.
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.
The Georgia Alliance of African American Attorneys (GAAAA) is a minority bar association in the state of Georgia in the United States. Founded in 1992, the GAAAA was created as a result of the legal case of Tyrone Brooks, et al., v. Georgia State Board of Elections and Max Cleland, Secretary of State and Chairman of the Georgia State Board of Elections. The State of was accused of not having enough diversity in judges. The litigation resulted in Georgia having the second-largest number of African American judges in any American state—second only to the state of Michigan.
Michael J. Perry is an American legal scholar, specializing in constitutional law, human rights, and law and religion.
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.
Elizabeth Lee "Lisa" Branch is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She is a former judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals.
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.
