Michael Meltsner Papers

Michael Charles Meltsner was born on March 29, 1937, in New York City, New York, to Ira D. and Alice Goldberg Meltsner.

Meltsner attended Oberlin College from 1953 to 1957 and graduated in 1957 with the A.B. degree in History. He was very active in political student organizations while at Oberlin, where he held the position of treasurer of the Young Democrats and was the Chairman for New York State at the 1956 Mock Convention. Meltsner also wrote for the Oberlin Review and the Yeoman student publications, served on the Men’s Board, participated in the Mummer’s Club, and played football.

After graduating from Oberlin, Meltsner enrolled at Yale University and received his J.D./LL.B. in 1960. Meltsner was hired almost directly after graduating from Yale as First Assistant Counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) in 1961. Meltsner was the last lawyer hired at the LDF by Thurgood Marshall before Marshall left for his career as a judge. While at the LDF, Meltsner was also Co-Director of the National Office for the Rights of the Indigent (NORI).

Meltsner argued hundreds of cases while at the LDF and NORI, including cases in front of the Supreme Court. Meltsner first argued a capital case before the Supreme Court when he was only 26 years old. He had to receive special permission from the Court because he had so recently been accepted to the bar. He famously represented Muhammad Ali in the litigation that removed legal barriers barring his return to the boxing ring after Ali refused induction into the Army. Meltsner also tried the case Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, that led to the integration of hundreds of southern hospitals.

In 1970, Meltsner started working at the Columbia University School of Law as Professor of Law. There, he co-founded and directed the Morningside Heights Legal Services, Inc., a law school-sponsored legal services program in which second and third year students represented indigent clients under faculty supervision. He also co-founded the school’s first legal clinic.

Meltsner was still active as a practicing lawyer during his time at Columbia. In 1972, he was one of the lawyers in the Furman v. Georgia case, which decided that the capital sentencing laws in force in 39 states were cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Marshall Project has said of Professor Meltsner, that he and LDF lawyer Anthony Amsterdam “did more to shape the death penalty law than any attorneys in American history." After Furman v. Georgia, Meltsner used his experiences and diary he kept to write Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (1973). Cruel and Unusual received extensive praise, including from Hugo Adam Bedau, philosophy and death penalty scholar.