Charles L. Black Jr.

Professor Charles L. Black Jr., a leading authority in constitutional law who taught at Columbia and Yale Universities for 52 years, died in his home in Manhattan on Sat. 5/5 at the age of 85, reported the NEW YORK TIMES 5/8.

According to his wife, Barbara Aronstein Black, the cause of death was respiratory failure after a long illness.

Black was a prominent voice in national debates on the presidential impeachments, desegregation, the death penalty and other issues.

In 1954, Black helped Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., to write the legal brief for Linda Brown, a 10-year old girl in Topeka Kan., whose historic case, Brown vs. the Board of Education, became the Supreme Court's ultimate judgment on segregation in America.

Black taught generations of law students, first at Columbia from 1947 to 1956, then at Yale for 30 years, then again at Columbia from 1986 until his health began to fail two years ago.

Among his students were Hillary Rodham Clinton and countless others who later became leaders in government, business or academic life. One of them was his wife, the George Welwood Murray Professor of Law at Columbia and the school's first woman dean, serving from 1986 to 1991.

Black wrote more than 20 books and hundreds of articles on constitutional law, admiralty law, capital punishment and the role of the judiciary among other subjects. He was widely praised for his book, "Impeachment: A Handbook," in 1974 when President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the Watergate Scandal, and also when reissued during the 1999 proceedings against President Bill Clinton.

Black was born on Sept. 22 1915, in Austin, Tex., one of three children of Charles L. Black Sr., a renowned lawyer, and Alzada Bowman Black.

He graduated from Austin High School at 16 in 1931 and entered the University of Texas, focusing on Greek classics.

After taking a bachelors degree in 1935, he went to Europe to indulge his appreciation of ballet. He enrolled at Yale and earned a master's degree in Old and Middle English Literature. He entered Yale Law School in 1940 and graduated in 1943.

He later served in the Army Air Corps as a teacher and after the war, practiced Law for a year with the New York firm of Davis, Polk and Wardwell, Sunderland & Kiendl.

With a preference for teaching he joined the Columbia law faculty in 1947 and became a full professor in a few years. In 1954, he married Barbara Aronstein.

Beside his wife, he is survived by two sons, Gavin and David; a daughter, Robin, and his brother, Thomas Black.