Remembering Judge Robert Carter’s First Amendment Legacy

This week Judge Robert Carter, part of the legendary team of NAACP lawyers who won Brown v. Board of Education, died at the age of 94. First Amendment Center scholar David Hudson pays tribute to Judge Carter’s work on behalf of the First Amendment, writing:

Carter noted in his book, A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in the Cause of Equal Rights, that he wrote his thesis at Columbia Law School (where he earned a master’s in law in 1941) “on the essentiality of the First Amendment for the preservation of a democratic society.”

Carter later used this thesis when developing arguments before the Supreme Court, including NAACP v. Alabama (1958), in which he successfully argued that the First Amendment protected the free-association rights of rank-and-file members of the NAACP from having their names disclosed to Alabama state officials bent on using that information for negative purposes.

NAACP v. Alabama was one of eight First Amendment cases Carter argued at the Supreme Court.

JFB