Charles L. Black Jr.; Law Professor, Influential Expert on Constitution

Charles L. Black Jr., a towering figure in constitutional law whose eloquent arguments influenced debates over civil rights, capital punishment and presidential impeachment, died Saturday in New York City after a lengthy illness. He was 85.

The law professor, who taught for 52 years at Yale and Columbia universities, was venerated not only as a brilliant thinker on the Constitution but for embodying a rounded conception of what a lawyer should be: He studied the Greek classics, played trumpet and harmonica and was a published poet. He could enthrall audiences with references to Descartes and Japanese gods, all delivered in a thick Texas drawl, often with a corncob pipe in his mouth.

Black also was an expert on admiralty law who co-authored a 1957 book that is still considered the definitive text on the subject.

His 1974 layman’s guide to impeachment--published during the Watergate crisis--was rushed back into print in 1998, in time to inform debates over the beleaguered Clinton presidency.

With the publication of a 1969 book, Black advocated interpreting the Constitution as a whole, rather than taking a literal reading of its many parts.

The book “had a huge influence on the way constitutional law has been taught ever since,” said Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale who taught constitutional law for 20 years.

Schmidt called Black a giant in the field who was “the only authentic genius” he had ever encountered in law.

The son of a prominent Austin lawyer, Black graduated from high school at the age of 16 and entered the University of Texas, where “good old boys” did not, as Black did, major in Greek.

One night in 1931, the college freshman was drawn to an Austin dance hall, mainly because of the promise of young women to date. It was certainly not because of the featured performer: He’d never heard of Louis Armstrong. But that night became fixed in his memory.

He was transported by the aching trumpet playing of the jazz great. Armstrong, Black wrote many years later, “was the first genius I had ever seen.”

It was an epiphanic moment for a young white Southerner who had never known an African American who was not a servant.

“Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ What was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?”

After that night, Black said, he “started walking toward the Brown [vs. Board of Education school desegregation] case, where I belonged” and on which he worked.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1935 and indulging his passion for ballet in Europe, he entered Yale, where he pursued graduate studies in Old English. Bored with that subject after attaining a master’s degree, he was admitted to Yale Law School, graduating in 1943.

He served in the Army Air Corps as a teacher during World War II, then joined a Wall Street law firm for a few years. Realizing that teaching better suited him, he joined the faculty of Columbia’s law school, where his first assignment was admiralty law, in 1947. There, he met his wife, Barbara Aronstein, who four decades later would become the law school’s first female dean.

In 1954, Black talked his way onto Thurgood Marshall’s legal team for the Brown case by telling a sly story. Delivered with a mixture of Southern grandiloquence and good old boy charm, he told Marshall he had heard that hidden in NAACP headquarters was a vast room hung with keys, each of which would unlock the bedroom of a white Southern woman.

Marshall, the story goes, was won over by this stranger who knew that poking fun at white fears and his own Southern heritage would succeed where an earnest plea to help might not. Black was invited to join the effort, lending his expertise as a theoretician in constitutional law to help shape the landmark case.

“It was not a time when white lawyers of the South were doing anything about civil rights,” said Louis H. Pollak, a federal judge in Philadelphia who knew Black from working with him on school segregation cases for the NAACP. “Charles was unique, a white Southerner strongly engaged in these matters. I can’t remember any other white Southern lawyer in the group.”

In later writings, including his 1960 book, “The People and the Court,” Black defended the Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren against the ferocious attacks that it had strayed into politics by setting aside state laws that allowed racial segregation in schools.

“Of all the major constitutional law scholars working at that time,” said Schmidt, who clerked for Warren in the late 1960s, “Charles Black articulated the most eloquent and compelling defense of the Warren court’s very active judicial attack on the constitutionality of segregation.

“When I clerked for Chief Justice Warren, Warren remarked to me how important he felt Black’s work was for the court,” Schmidt added. “Charles Black’s defense became by far the overwhelming and dominant view within a decade or so of Brown about the democratic character of judicial review.”

The year after the Brown case was decided, Black went to Yale as a visiting professor and stayed for the next three decades, teaching (Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of his students), writing and working on cases. After retiring from Yale, he returned to Columbia in 1986 as an adjunct professor.

He wrote more than 20 books and scores of articles on the death penalty, constitutional law, admiralty law and other subjects.

He was called prescient by critics when his 1974 book, “Impeachment: A Handbook,” was reissued in the midst of President Bill Clinton’s troubles over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the book, which was rushed back into print word for word as written two decades earlier, Black speculated about a president who brought an underage female across state lines for immoral purposes, in violation of the federal Mann Act, or who illegally helped a young White House intern conceal possession of marijuana.

Black said these would be preposterous reasons to remove a president from office. Impeachment, he said, should be reserved for extremely serious offenses that “in some way corrupt or subvert the political and governmental process.”

He wrote “Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake,” also published in 1974, to argue against using the current judicial process to decide who should die.

“He made a very careful, powerful lawyer’s argument . . . that the problem with the death penalty was you can’t correct your mistake,” Schmidt said. “It affected a lot of people who viewed the ultimate ethical question as a quandary.”

Black was beloved by students, whom he often advised to avoid his classes in favor of Greek or entomology. Every year after Armstrong’s death in 1971 he invited them to a musical tribute in the Yale faculty lounge, where he played and offered amusing comments on vintage Armstrong recordings from an extensive personal collective

“Students need to be told that you can be a lawyer and not be crushed,” he said many years ago, when he was struggling to find a publisher for his second volume of poetry.

He was once described as a poet disguised as a lawyer, who wrote and spoke in a rich brew of Southern rhetoric, humor and metaphor unrivaled by any other legal scholar of the past century.

He declined to analyze the parallels between those two of his callings. But he acknowledged that there is poetry in law. “The poetry of law is the motive for solving problems,” he wrote, “the sacred stir toward justice, our priceless discontent at the remoteness of perfect law.”

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MEMOIR

Here is an excerpt from “My World with Louis Armstrong,” an essay by Charles L. Black Jr. that was originally published in the Yale Review in 1979. In this passage he describes his reaction to hearing Armstrong play in 1931, when he was 16 and a college student in Austin, Texas.

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“He was the first genius I had ever seen. That may be a structurable part of the process that led me to the Brown case. . . . The moment of first being, and knowing oneself to be, in the presence of genius, is a solemn moment; it is perhaps the moment of final and indelible perception of man’s utter transcendence of all else created. It is impossible to overstate the significance of a 16-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black. We literally never saw a black, then, in any but a servant’s capacity. There were of course black professionals and intellectuals in Austin, as one later learned, but they kept to themselves, out back of town; no doubt shunning humiliation. I liked most of the blacks I knew; I loved a few of them--like old Buck Green, born and raised a slave, who still plays the harmonica through my mouth, having taught me when he was 75 and I was 10. Some were honored and venerated, in that paradoxical white-Southern way. . . . But genius--fine control over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever? It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man. . . .

That October night, I was standing in the crowd with a “good old boy” from Austin High. We listened together for a long time. Then he turned to me, shook his head as if clearing it--as I’m sure he was--of an unacceptable though vague thought, and pronounced the judgment of the time and place: “After all, he’s nothing but a God damn nigger!”

The good old boy did not await, perhaps fearing, reply. He walked one way and I the other. Through many years now, I have felt that it was just then that I started walking toward the Brown case, where I belonged. . . . Every person of decency in the South of those days must have had some doubts about racism, and I had had mine even then--perhaps more than most others. But Louis opened my eyes wide, and put to me a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were “all right in their place.” What was the “place” of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?”