Louis Marshall

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Louis Marshall

American lawyer

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Last Updated: Dec 10, 2024 • Article History

Quick Facts

Born:: Dec. 14, 1856, Syracuse, N.Y., U.S.

Died:: Sept. 11, 1929, Zürich, Switz. (aged 72)

Role In:: American civil rights movement

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Louis Marshall (born Dec. 14, 1856, Syracuse, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 11, 1929, Zürich, Switz.) was a lawyer and leader of the American Jewish community who worked to secure religious, political, and cultural freedom for all minority groups.

Marshall attended Columbia Law School (1876–77) and was admitted to the New York bar (1878). Marshall successfully argued a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional state statutes excluding black voters from primary elections (Nixon v. Herndon, 1927). He also wrote an influential amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Name (1925), in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could not ban private and parochial elementary and secondary schools. At the Paris Peace Conference after World War I (1919), Marshall advocated treaty provisions that were intended to protect minority rights and were accepted by Romania, Poland, and other eastern European nations. His opposition hastened the discontinuance of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn (Michigan) Independent.

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