Charles Black

Charles Lund Black, Jr. (September 22, 1915 – May 5, 2001) was an American scholar of constitutional law, which he taught as professor of law from 1947 to 1999. He is best known for his role in the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, as well as for his Impeachment: A Handbook, which served for many Americans as a trustworthy analysis of the law of impeachment during the Watergate scandal.

Early life and career Born in Austin, Texas, Black graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1935 and later obtained a master's degree in English. He received his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1943, then served in the Army Air Forces as a teacher and as an associate at Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland & Kiendl. In 1947, he became a professor of law at the Columbia University Law School, where he wrote legal briefs for the successful 1954 Brown v. Board of Education suit. He also was involved in civil rights cases in the south.

In 1956, he joined Yale Law School as its first Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence. He was appointed Sterling Professor of Law in 1975. During his thirty-one-year career at Yale, he wrote numerous books, including The People and the Court, Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law, and Impeachment: A Handbook.

An outspoken critic of the death penalty, Black also authored Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake.

Black was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. He returned to Columbia Law School in 1986, when his wife Barbara Aronstein Black became dean there. He served as adjunct professor of law until 1999. Black, who held an annual "Armstrong Evening" at Yale until the musician's death in 1971, was featured in the 2001 Ken Burns miniseries, Jazz.

Selected works 1957 – The Law of Admiralty, by Grant Gilmore and Charles Black 1958 – Old and New Ways in Judicial Review 1960 – The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy 1963 – Perspectives in Constitutional Law 1963 – Telescopes & Islands. Poems 1970 – The Unfinished Business of the Warren Court 1974 – Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake 1974 – Impeachment: A Handbook 1981 – Decision According to Law 1985 – Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law 1986 – The Humane Imagination 1997 – A New Birth of Freedom: Human Rights, Named and Unnamed