David Carliner, 89; dedicated career to immigration and civil rights cases

David Carliner, an immigration and civil rights lawyer who spent his career pleading for the rights of the country’s disenfranchised, died of a heart attack Sept. 19 at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was 89.

In his private law practice and as the first chairman of the District of Columbia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Carliner took up causes that many considered unpopular or foolhardy. He often was on the losing side in court, but he lived long enough to see judges, legislators and public opinion adopt many views he had advocated years before.

Carliner was born Aug. 13, 1918, in Washington, D.C., the son of a grocer. After a year at American University, he enrolled at the University of Virginia and entered the law school before he completed his undergraduate degree.

In 1940, he was expelled from law school when he was arrested for distributing the writings of Communist leader Earl Browder. Carliner returned to Washington and graduated in 1941 from the National University School of Law, which later became part of George Washington University.

During World War II, he completed Officer Candidate School but was denied a commission, which he maintained was because of his political views. After the war he became one of the first lawyers to concentrate on immigration law, and by 1954 he handled his first high-profile case, Naim vs. Naim.

In 1952, Chinese immigrant Ham Say Naim married a woman in North Carolina and settled in Virginia. Two years later, she sought an annulment on the grounds that interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia.

Carliner argued that the anti-miscegenation law violated the Constitution, but in 1955 the Virginia Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state had the right to “preserve the racial integrity of its citizens” and “to regulate the marriage relation so that it shall not have a mongrel breed of citizens.”

The U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down Virginia’s interracial marriage ban in 1967.

From 1957 to 1960, Carliner filed a series of suits to overturn Virginia’s prohibition on integrated seating at public events. In 1960, schools in suburban Arlington County, Va., finally allowed blacks and whites to sit together at public meetings.

After losing in the lower courts, Carliner won a landmark decision in 1965 when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a federal employee was wrongfully fired after he was arrested for soliciting gay sex in Washington’s Lafayette Square.

In 1966, Carliner defended Yale professor Staughton Lynd, whose passport had been seized after he visited Cuba and North Vietnam. Carliner ultimately won broader rights for U.S. citizens to travel overseas.

In 1979, after President Carter ordered federal agents to compile dossiers on 50,000 Iranian students in the United States, Carliner took up their cause and got the order rescinded.

Carliner was the founding chairman of the International Human Rights Law Group, which trained international human rights activists. He was the author of “The Rights of Aliens: The Basic Guide to an Alien’s Rights.”

He retired from his law firm, Carliner & Remes, in 2003.

He is survived by two children, four grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.