Robert L. Carter

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United States District Judge Robert L. Carter

Robert L. Carter (b. March 11, 1917) is a civil rights activist and judge.

[edit] Personal History and Early Life

Judge Robert Lee Carter was born on March 11, 1917, in Careyville, Florida. While still very young, his mother moved north to Newark, New Jersey, where he was raised. Judge Carter graduated from high school at sixteen and attended Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) on a scholarship and earned his bachelor's degree in political science. He attended Howard University School of Law on a scholarship. Carter graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1940. Carter earned his LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 1941, after writing an influential master's thesis that would later define the NAACP's legal strategy on the right to freedom of association under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

[edit] Career as a Leading Civil Rights Advocate

On behalf of Fordham Law School, dean William Treanor bestowed upon civil rights pioneer Judge Robert L. Carter a rare, honorary juris doctor. November, 2004

In 1944, upon completion of his wartime service in the United States Army Air Corps, Carter went to work as a legal assistant to Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In 1945, he became an assistant special counsel at the LDF. Judge Carter was a lead attorney on Sweatt v. Painter and presented part of the oral argument to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, and he also worked on many important civil rights cases, including Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Oklahoma.

In 1956 Carter succeeded Thurgood Marshall as the general counsel of the NAACP. Over the course of his tenure, Carter argued or co-argued and won twenty-one of twenty-two cases in the Supreme Court.

Among the most important cases Judge Carter worked on after Brown was NAACP v. Alabama (1958), in which the Supreme Court held that the NAACP could not be required to make its membership lists public. This removed a tool of intimidation employed by some southern states after Brown was decided, and put into practice the insights into the First Amendment that Carter had gleaned when still a student at Columbia Law School.

In recognition of his civil rights achievements, Fordham University School of Law gave Carter an honorary juris doctor degree in November 2004.

[edit] Judicial career

In 1972, Carter was appointed to the bench as a Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

[edit] Activism and Civic Leadership

Judge Carter was a co-founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL). He has served as a member of innumerable committees of the bar and the court, and has been associated with a very wide array of educational institutions, organizations, and foundations. He has written extensively about discrimination in the United States, particularly school segregation, and of his longtime friends and colleagues, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston.

The Cover of Judge Carter's memoirs, "A Matter of Law."

[edit] Literary Contributions

In addition to writing numerous law review articles and essays on civil rights, Judge Carter published a well-received memoir of his strugges as a civil rights advocate.

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