Daniel Levy, 48; Attorney Advocated Refugee Rights

C. Daniel Levy, who turned to law after studying anthropology and became a nationally known defender of immigrant and refugee rights, died Friday after a long fight with cancer. The West Hollywood resident was 48.

Levy, a native of Peru, helped litigate numerous landmark cases involving the rights of naturalized citizens, children and families.

“We have prematurely lost a great scholar, colleague and friend,” said Daniel Grunfeld, president of Public Counsel, where Levy had headed the Immigrants’ Rights Project since February. “Daniel will be remembered not only for his extraordinary professional accomplishments, but also for his courage, dignity and gentleness.”

Among the best-known cases Levy worked on was the ultimately successful effort to free six Iraqi opposition leaders detained in California.

Levy’s lengthy treatise, “U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Handbook,” is recognized as a leading work on the subject.

But law was not his first intellectual passion. He was born in Lima, where his family ran a textile business. He came to the United States in 1970, and studied philosophy and anthropology at Columbia University in New York.

Levy began his anthropological career researching the religion and beliefs of the Shipibos tribe in Peru’s Amazon basin.

In an interview this year with the Daily Journal, he said the Amazon experience heightened his awareness of society’s bias against indigenous and poor people. Formal legal training, he reasoned, would better enable him to battle such injustice.

“It was the logical progression for me,” Levy told the legal publication. “Rather than observing, I could work toward making things as they should be.”

After his Amazon studies, Levy returned to New York and entered law school at Columbia, graduating in 1985.

He found work as an intern for the Lawyers’ Committee for Human and Civil Rights in New York.

There, he focused on refugee issues at a time when immigration to the United States was rising sharply, as was the need for capable lawyers willing to defend the rights of new arrivals.

Levy came to Los Angeles and in 1986-87 was a staff attorney for El Rescate Legal Services. He represented Central Americans seeking political asylum in the United States.

In 1987, he became a staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles. He spent eight years there, training attorneys and paralegals nationwide in immigration and nationality law.

He joined the Los Angeles offices of Bernard P. Wolfsdorf in 1995 as a senior attorney. Levy entered solo practice in 1999, before joining Public Counsel’s staff this year.

He is survived by his wife, Raquel Ackerman; two children, Antonio and Eva; three brothers; and his mother, Ethel Levy.