Charles Black

Personal

Vocation

American scholar of constitutional law, which he taught as professor of law from 1947 to 1999. He is best known for his role in the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, as well as for his Impeachment: A Handbook, which served for many Americans as a trustworthy analysis of the law of impeachment during the Watergate scandal. In 1956, he joined Yale Law School as its first Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence. He was appointed Sterling Professor of Law in 1975. During his thirty-one-year career at Yale, he wrote numerous books, including The People and the Court, Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law, and Impeachment: A Handbook. An outspoken critic of the death penalty, Professor Black also authored Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake. With Alexander Bickel, Black made Yale Law School one of the world's leading centres for the study of constitutional law. Black also co-authored The Law of Admiralty with Grant Gilmore. Black died on 5 May 2001, aged 85, in New York City. Link to Wikipedia biography