Yale Kamisar, a legal scholar whose work on civil liberties and criminal procedure had a profound influence on landmark Supreme Court decisions like Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona, died on Sunday at his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 92.
His son Gordon confirmed the death.
Professor Kamisar began to wrestle with the issues of criminal procedure — the rules under which the legal system adjudicates crimes — in the late 1950s, as a newly hired faculty member at the University of Minnesota.
At the time, the subject was considered largely a sideshow to the big questions in constitutional law. What few courses existed were sloughed off on new hires, and everyone expected Professor Kamisar to move quickly into teaching antitrust, an area he knew from his time working for a Washington law firm.
Instead, within a decade he established himself as the leading figure in an area of the law that, thanks in large part to his work, suddenly seemed not just important but intellectually vibrant. He continued that work at the University of Michigan, where he moved in 1965.
The man had met the moment. By the early 1960s the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, was emerging as a bulwark of civil liberties. And the White House, first under John F. Kennedy and then under Lyndon B. Johnson, was expanding its defense of civil rights, in part by making sure that people of color had legal protections against abuse by law enforcement.
“There was this period of police brutalization of predominantly Black and brown people, especially in the South,” said Eve Primus, who also studied under Professor Kamisar and now holds a chair in his name at Michigan. “Yale, being the person that he was, understood that there were opportunities to move law forward.”
His work was first cited by the Supreme Court in its 1963 decision in Gideon, which established the right to legal counsel in criminal cases. Written by Justice Hugo Black, it was the first of more than 30 decisions over the next half-century to cite Professor Kamisar’s work.
“He was writing articles about what the court should do and what the court had done recently, and they were in turn citing him,” Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview.
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