Melvyn Zarr Interview Transcript

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project  

 

Melvyn Zarr 

Interviewed by Seth Kotch 

October 7, 2023 

Falmouth, ME 

Length: 01:27:04 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program at University of North 
Carolina at Chapel Hill 

 

LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. 



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This transcript has been reviewed by Melvyn Zarr, the Southern Oral History Program, and LDF. 

It has been lightly edited, in consultation Melvyn Zarr, for readability and clarity. Additions and 

corrections appear in both brackets and footnotes. If viewing corresponding video footage, please 

refer to this transcript for corrected information.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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[START OF INTERVIEW] 

Seth Kotch: This is Seth Kotch from the Southern Oral History Program and the Center 

for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is 

October 7, 2023, and I’m here in Falmouth, Maine, with Melvyn Zarr to conduct an interview for 

the LDF Oral History Project. Thank you very much for sitting down with me. 

Melvyn Zarr: Glad to do it. 

SK: There we go. Can you introduce yourself, please? 

MZ: I’m Mel Zarr. I worked for the Legal Defense Fund from 1963, starting in the 

summer of [19]63, and then being hired full time in the fall. And I worked there for six years 

until the fall of [19]69. And I’ve been teaching at the University of Maine Law School since 

1973. So, this is my fiftieth year.  

SK: Wonderful, congratulations. So, now comes the interview, when we ask you to 

restate that, just slightly longer, over the course of a number of questions. You’re originally from 

Massachusetts. 

MZ: Yes. 

SK: Can you share a little bit about your upbringing? 

MZ: Yes. I was born in 1936 in Worcester, Mass. We lived on Kilby Street, which the 

significance is, it was a very poor neighborhood. It's no longer such a poor neighborhood 

because Clark [University] has taken over part of it. But I grew up very poor and we lived on 

Kilby Street, as I said, and [my brother and I] went to the local schools and went to high school 

and middle school, all within a one-mile area.   

SK: Growing up poor, did you feel poor? Did you sort of have experiences that made you 

notice that poverty, such as encountering wealthier kids or things like that?  



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MZ: No, we didn't encounter wealthier kids. Everybody around us was poor. There was 

one oasis of middle-class America, and there was a pharmacy at the corner of Main Street and 

Kilby, and the pharmacist was named Lester Feingold. And my mother was very impressed with 

the fact that he had a full-time job and made a good salary. And she wanted me to be a 

pharmacist. She thought that would be a high calling. It would be a steady job. There would be 

demand for pharmacists. And so that was the pressure she had.  

SK: [00:02:16] Does that mean that other men in her life, maybe your father, didn't have 

that kind of steady income? 

MZ: No, he had an [income but also] a gambling problem, and he didn't make much 

money in the first place. He drove a delivery truck and he got into trouble, embezzled money, 

and was on the run for a while. And so he had a rough time of it, as I say. And so we had to 

scratch by.  

SK: And you went to Clark, also in Worcester, for undergraduate?  

MZ: Yes. 

SK: How did you go from this environment that may not, well, maybe I'm stereotyping 

here, but I'm wondering — let me back up. How supportive was the environment that you're 

growing up in? And are you thinking that you were on a trajectory to go to undergraduate?  

MZ: No, no, absolutely not. In fact, when I told my father that I was going to go to 

college, he was amazed. He was stunned. He wondered how I was going to do that. I said, well, I 

got a four-year full scholarship. He said, “Wow.” He said, “Did they give you it in cash?” 

[laughter] I could see the wheels were turning. I said, “No, not in cash.” [Before that] my mother 

and I had a deal. As I said, she loved the idea of my being a pharmacist. We had an old car, made 

it down to Boston, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. And she wanted me to go there to be 



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a pharmacist. And my brother and I, he’s a year and a half younger, we went down and we 

looked at the building and on the [pediment], it says, “He who has no knowledge of geometry 

may not enter the portals of this academy.” We didn't know that that was Aristotle. But anyway. 

We thought that was the funniest thing. We were just rolling in laughter in the backseat. We said, 

“We’re not going there. We took geometry in high school. We don’t think that that’s a big deal. 

No geometry.” [00:04:10] And so, I made a deal with my mother. My father, by this time, was 

out of the picture. And if I went to college, a regular college, I would study chemistry, because 

she had read that chemists were always [employed]. And that was kind of being a high-class 

pharmacist. And so that was a deal. And so I kept my part of the deal. I was a chemistry major 

and a physics minor.  

SK: And yet somehow you went astray. 

MZ: Somehow, but that was later in graduate school. 

SK: So, you, did you go directly from Clark to Harvard?  

MZ: No. I went to graduate school at Princeton in chemistry, and I did three semesters at 

Princeton. I completed all the coursework for the Ph.D. and then I had to pick a dissertation 

topic. Meanwhile, I don't know if you're familiar with Princeton, but they had something called 

The Graduate College, where all the graduate students lived together. And I found myself 

hanging out more with the poli-sci types and the government types and the history types, and not 

so much with the chemistry types. And it started to dawn on me that maybe was teaching me 

something. That maybe I didn't really want to spend my life doing chemistry research. And I 

started thinking that maybe there was something else for me out there other than that. But if you 

left graduate school back then in 1960, this is in the beginning of 1960, you are teed up for the 

draft. And so, you either stayed in graduate school or you're going to get drafted. This was before 



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Vietnam, but it still was no fun to be drafted for two years. And so I decided that, well, what I'd 

better do is be proactive. And so I went and joined the Army Reserves. [00:06:05] And that 

meant that you only had to do six months’ active duty and then you would [do] five and a half 

years in the Reserves. And so that's what I did. I was down at Fort Dix for active duty and I 

decided, while I was in basic training, I was thinking, “Maybe I’ll go to law school." Because I 

liked history and government. I hadn't done enough of it. I studied too much physics and math 

and chemistry in college. I thought I would try something different. And so I sent away to 

Harvard and Yale for applications for law school. And I asked the top sergeant if I, after hours, 

could go into the company room and use the typewriter and make out college applications, law 

school applications. So, [one night] I was doing that. I had made out the Harvard one, and I was 

working on the Yale one when another sergeant came by and said, “What are you doing here?” 

And I explained, and he said, “You get the hell out of here.” And so, I never applied to Yale, I 

only applied to Harvard. So, that's why I went to Harvard, it accepted me, it was the only place 

that accepted me, it was the only place I applied to. So, it was very easy.  

SK: It worked out. So, you were in, I suppose, at Clark in the late fifties. And then at 

Princeton and I suppose at Harvard as well in the early 1960s. This is when the Civil Rights 

Movement is maybe becoming visible for lots of people for the first time. Are you seeing any of 

that in the army and in college?  

MZ: [00:07:45] No. No. If I think back and say, well, I was in college from [19]54 to 

[19]58 and there was stuff going on then, there was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. When I think 

back, I don't think I had any exposure to that. I was so busy, nose to the grindstone doing my 

coursework. And I had a lot of extracurriculars at Clark. And so, between the extracurriculars 

and the academics — Clark has no football team or anything like that. It's not a party school. It's 



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an academic school. And so I studied and I don’t, I saw your question and I thought to myself, 

you know, I don't think I have any real memory of the Civil Rights Movement at all. I was just 

doing my stuff. Mel Zarr from Worcester, Mass, doing his stuff. 

SK: And what were those extracurriculars that you were doing?  

MZ: Oh, I was a president of my fraternity, and I was in various clubs and things like 

that. It was just a busy social life and busy academics.  

SK: When you got to Harvard — and you graduated, I believe, in 1963 — when you got 

to Harvard, did you have a sense for what kind of law you wanted to practice?  

MZ: No, no. I’d gone to law school on a hunch, but the one thing I wanted to do was to 

make sure that instead of just being nose to the grindstone, which I had been for all of my life up 

to then, I would be much more critical of the experience. And so, [although] my classmates were 

so nervous about succeeding and their being competitive, I was in a [questioning] mode that was 

quite different, which was: Who are these professors? And what are they teaching [me]? And 

what good would it do me [to] do something different in my life? And so, I wasn't pursuing 

grades anymore. I’d finished that. I’d said, now I'm going to be critical of the experience. I'm 

going to think about the experience and what I'm doing. So, if I wasn't interested in the course, I 

just didn't pay much attention to it. I figured I could get by. And if I was very interested in the 

course, then I would take it really seriously.   

SK: [00:09:59] That seems like a remarkable change to undergo to go from this nose to 

the grindstone student to someone who is much more kind of aware of the larger environment of 

what learning is and what being a student is. Was there anything that you can look back to, to 

identify the turning point for your mindset?  



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MZ: Well, I think the turning point was to admire those few professors that were really 

good professors. And so those you could name on the fingers of one hand. Most of the professors 

were there [because of their] research interests, and that's how they become professors at 

Harvard Law School. You didn't get to be a full professor at Harvard Law School by dint of good 

teaching, [but] by dint of publication. That's how you succeeded. Publish or perish was truly 

there. There were some exceptions to the rule. Al Sacks, who taught civil procedure, the guy who 

taught criminal law. There were some exceptions, but they were exceptions. And for most of the 

professors I had in law school, I thought to myself, “I can teach better than that.” That was my 

effrontery, that was my conceit. That was what eventually drove me into teaching. I could do 

better than that. I mean, these people are teaching mystery courses and you could make it much 

more accessible if you just did this. And so, I was very, very reflective as a student about what 

the teaching experience was, what the learning experience was. And so as a result, I picked and 

chose [among] the things that interested me, I really worked hard at [them]. Things that didn't 

interest me I just kind of sloughed off. And I thought, I can pass those exams, but I'm going to 

focus on the things that really matter to me. And those turned out to be procedure courses, civil 

procedure, criminal procedure, substantive courses like criminal law, constitutional law. I got 

assigned to a constitutional law section where [the professor] was this old guy who had made his 

specialty on the Commerce Clause, especially [so-called] milk cases and the Commerce Clause. 

And that's what he taught. [00:12:15] And I thought, “Oh, that's boring.” There was another 

professor who taught what I would consider groovy constitutional law. And I went to him and 

the people I knew said, “This is suicide. You'll never be able to pass the other guy's exam.” “Oh, 

that's fine. I'll do it.” And so, I took the groovy course and took the exam in the bad course, and 

did fine. It was just a question of being critical. I was a very critical law student. In the article, I 



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pointed out that I made my own clinical program. We didn't have any clinical programs back in 

the day. But I actually went and talked to the DA down in Cambridge, the Middlesex County 

DA, an old Boston pol, John Droney, [in the] tradition of Irish DAs. And he was absolutely 

fascinated by the idea that someone from Harvard would actually be interested in what his office 

did. I mean, this was a route from Harvard to Wall Street. I mean, why would, no one had 

apparently ever come by and shown any interest in the work of the DA. And here I was. And so I 

was kind of a curiosity, a rare plant in this thing. And I did well enough so that he offered me a 

job.  

SK: And so, this was the first job that you were offered out of law school?  

MZ: Yes.  

SK: What made you want to become a prosecutor?  

MZ: Fairness. It seemed to me that — nowadays there's a name for it. The progressive 

prosecutor, you ever heard of that? The shibboleth. But there was no name for it back then. But 

that's what I wanted to do. I thought early on, “Prosecutors can do a lot of good instead of just 

locking people for as long as possible. They can make judgment calls that can actually lead to 

some kind of justice.” I had this idea that the reason I'd gone to law school was to pursue justice 

[not high pay]. I mean, highfalutin sounding. But I had this, that was the aim, not to make 

money. I didn't think that was about that. But I thought, “That would be a good way to pursue 

justice, to be a prosecutor.”  

SK: [00:14:26] So, you had this gap between, I believe, between leaving law school 

maybe in the beginning of your budding career as a prosecutor.  

MZ: Yes.  

SK: Maybe a two month gap. 



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MZ: Yes, it was probably a little more because back then in the old days, the Superior 

Court in Middlesex County didn't meet in the summer. I mean, the Supreme Court judges took 

the summer off or did something, but the courts weren’t open and so my job wouldn't start until 

maybe September or October. I wasn't even sure exactly when. And so, I was, I had a free 

summer and I went to the placement office and said, “What you got?” And they, eventually they 

said, “Well, we have [at temp job at] this thing called the LDF.” And I said, “Well, what's that?” 

And they explained it to me. And I said, “That sounds interesting.”  

SK: I feel like you've answered this just by describing what sounds like a pretty 

prodigious work ethic as a young person. But when I was looking at your article, I was chuckling 

to myself because I was thinking if I had a two-month break, there's no way I'm looking for a 

job. [laughter] What made you try to fill the gap then?  

MZ: I had no money. I had no money whatsoever. [laughter] First of all, back then, it 

was cheap to go to Harvard Law School. You didn't have to amass debt. And I had gotten some 

sort of scholarship aid, and I'd gotten by on that. It was, it's remarkable now. The tuition is so 

incredible and people have to take on all the student debt. But I had attended college because I 

had a four-year scholarship. It was a one of a kind scholarship to Clark. It was, you not only got 

full tuition, but you got extra money for books and walking around money. It was, that was the 

most incredible thing. You took a competitive exam and [only] one person got the scholarship 

and I got the scholarship. Then the next year, my brother got the scholarship. So, he went to 

Clark, too.  

SK: [00:16:30] That's amazing. Speaking of your brother, your family. Was your mom 

watching in horror as you moved further and further from her dream of being a pharmacist? 



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MZ: No. She was just glad I was [going to be] employed. The important thing was to be 

employed, have a job. Pharmacy had just been a means to an end, which is to have a job. And I 

now had a job. And [because] I had a job, she was happy.  

SK: It seems like at LDF people were expected to become experts very quickly in new 

kinds of law and procedure. I think you wrote that you were considered a civil rights expert 

about six months into your tenure there. Can you talk about the process of educating yourself or 

being educated by other staff at LDF and how you got to this position where, as a very young 

attorney, you had a great deal of, from what I could see, responsibility over hugely momentous 

events?  

MZ: Yes. I keep putting “expert” in quotes because it's whimsical. The fact is I didn't 

consider myself an expert. But the first thing I did when I went to LDF was, since our practice 

was in the federal courts — I had never taken the federal courts course. And the reason I never 

taken the federal courts course was two reasons. One, the professor was supposed to be boring 

and I was avoiding boring professors. And two, it was supposed to be a mystery course. People 

would come out of the course thinking, “I don't know what the hell is going on.” And they would 

take their chances and whatnot. Just to skip forward 50 years, having taught the federal courts 

course for 50 years, there is an incredible amount of difficult doctrinal matter in the federal 

courts course, but it's possible to make it more accessible. If you're not interested, if that's not 

your chief goal, to make it more accessible, then it's going to continue to be a mystery course. 

But that’s skipping to the end. But in any event, I got the textbook from the course. [00:18:32] 

And once I was at the Legal Defense Fund, I was reading up on it and I realized that the kind of 

stuff the Legal Defense Fund was doing was off to the side, it wasn't in the book at all. The kind 

of cases that were in the book that didn't have much of anything to do with what the Legal 



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Defense Fund was doing. And so that's why being an expert consisted of reading the [latest] 

cases. What you did was you just buckled down and read the cases. From the Supreme Court, 

from the Courts of Appeals, from the District [Courts]. You just read law. That was the way to 

become an expert because the federal courts coursework wasn't going to help. And the treatises 

weren't going to help you. This was all on the front line. It hadn't been adapted into the treatises 

or the textbooks or the casebooks or whatnot. And so that's why I put expert in quotes. It was 

basically being up to date.  

SK: And so, on that note, maybe, can you talk a little bit about what your day to day was 

like in those early days? Reading, writing, talking to staff? 

MZ: Well, let me just back up and say it was only going to be a summer job. And what 

they did was they gave me a brief to write, a draft. And I learned by doing and I worked on the 

draft and submitted it and they liked it. Obviously, it took a lot more work and polishing, but 

they thought I had promise. [00:20:06] And so they gave me a job, a full-time job. That's why I 

had to make a decision. I had to either decide to go back to Cambridge and be a [prosecutor] or 

to work at the Legal Defense Fund. And I thought, this is damn exciting. I started, the DA’s job 

involved trial level work. And here I started at the top, at the Supreme Court. My first case was 

to work on a Supreme Court brief. I mean, that, it seemed to me, was very impressive. The idea 

that I started my legal career by working on a Supreme Court case. And so that's what was the 

difference for me. So I stayed.  

SK: Do you recall what that case was?  

MZ: It was one of the sit-in cases from the [19]63 term. It was Barr, Bouie, Bell, one of 

those. I wish I could remember which one it was. But it was one of those. 

SK: And was it Jack Greenberg who initially brought you in? 



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MZ: Yes. Jack. By that time, he had been two years head of the Legal Defense Fund. 

Thurgood had left in [19]61, and Jack had been appointed his successor. I remember there was in 

Jack’s office, there was a big portrait of Thurgood Marshall. And in [his] scrawl it [had] said, 

“To the finest successor any man ever had.” And so obviously, he thought very highly of Jack. 

Meanwhile, Bob Carter, who had been passed over, was very resentful and left, he went to the 

NAACP itself.  

SK: Did that resentment play out at all in the office?  

MZ: No. By the time I got there in [19]63, it was very harmonious. You've talked to 

Mike Meltsner. He came a couple years before I did. And it was a very small office. And I think 

of it, I mean, I think back to it as an office in which [people were] just too busy to have any 

office politics. We were just too busy. There was too much to do. And I was really gung-ho. [At 

my] very first staff meeting, they were passing around cases and [people] would say, “Oh, I'm so 

piled up with this or that, I can't possibly take on another case.” And I would raise my hand and 

say, “Oh, I'll take it.” I was a really anxious guy. Anxious to take on stuff. The idea of taking on 

too much work just never occurred to me. [00:22:34] I was going to take on everything they 

could give me, I was going to take on. And so that was my stance at the Legal Defense Fund. 

And I thought of myself, if you’d asked me, what did I do at the Legal Defense Fund after all 

these years, I would think to myself, I was a teammate. I thought of myself as being on the team 

and if I was doing any position, [maybe a] kind of linebacker. [If] someone has some trouble on 

a brief, stuck on something, I'll help. Someone's done the first draft [but] it’s rough, I’ll read it 

and polish it up. Someone's doing this, need some help. I would kind of just float in the office. 

Wherever it seemed like there was a need for a linebacker help, that's where I would be. I would. 

I was a real glutton for work. But I, of course, I was single. I had a very dingy little apartment. 



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That's all I could afford. I spent virtually all my waking hours at the office, and I loved it. 

Absolutely loved it. 

SK: You said that Thurgood Marshall liked to come back to the office and tell stories 

from time to time. And you also said that you may have missed some of those stories because 

you were working so hard.  

MZ: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I was very driven, and thinking back, I thought, what a 

fool. I should have taken the time to listen to the stories, it would have been very educational. 

But I didn’t. It was just one of those things. Nonetheless, he moved my admission to the 

Supreme Court Bar. That was nice. He never held it against me. [laughter] 

SK: [00:24:08] Despite missing more stories than you would like to, do you have 

recollections of Thurgood Marshall being in the office?  

MZ: Just the fact he would come into the library and sit on the library table and tell 

stories and people would wander in and out and listen. And he always had an audience, but it 

was not necessarily a stable audience. People would come in. I would go to the library, pick up a 

book and walk out. Which was terrible. [laughter] 

SK: And what about Jack Greenberg?  

MZ: Jack was a terrific boss. When I first got there, I didn't really know how to draft a 

brief, especially a statement of facts. I was always telling the first-year students, you've got to 

make the statement of facts sing. And they would take a very mechanical, wooden approach to 

the statement of facts in their moot court briefs. And I would say, “I learned the hard way, the 

statement of facts has got to grab the reader by the lapels,” especially the young, “and say, ‘Pay 

attention, this is a really interesting story.’” Early [on], Jack was very patient with me. He would 



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always say, “This needs to be beefed up.” That was his favorite expression. “Beef this up or beef 

that up.” And fortunately, I was a good student and I beefed it up.  

SK: So not too terribly long after you arrived at LDF, you were contacted or LDF was 

contacted by Mickey Schwerner because some of the workers that he was organizing had been 

jailed. This may have been the first time you were brought down to Mississippi. 

MZ: [00:25:52] Oh, absolutely. I was working on briefs until the Spring. And then, 

Schwerner called the Legal Defense Fund and said, “We’ve got all these people in jail. We had 

demonstrations in Meridian. We have all these people in jail. Please send someone to help.” And 

that was not [to] send someone to help and defend these cases in state court. That was murder. 

We wouldn't do that. And [since] I was an “expert” [in federal court]. I could now be sent down. 

I'd been working the Fund for, you know, eight months. [laughter] But on the other hand, I'd 

been doing the homework. I'd been studying the cases and whatnot. The whole idea was you 

have to get these cases out of state court somehow or other, tie them up in federal court, these 

state prosecutors don't like being in federal court. They don't know federal procedure. We do. 

And so that was our stock-in-trade. And so they would, so the idea was how to get them into 

federal court. And fortunately, right about this time, the Legal Defense Fund had the benefit of a 

law professor at Penn named Tony Amsterdam. And he is a legend. Everyone will talk about 

him, I'm sure Mike Meltsner talked about Tony Amsterdam. Everyone talks about Tony 

Amsterdam. Everyone has a favorite Tony Amsterdam story. Many. And in any event, he and I 

were going to go down, and fortunately he was a lot better student of the law than I was. And so, 

the two of us went together. And I remember we arrived in Jackson, it must’ve been May. And 

the thing that struck me most of all first was how damn hot and humid it was. It was incredible. 

I’m thinking, how can you work in this? We decided we were going to try to remove the cases 



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[to federal court]. We worked through the night and it was so hot in the office, we were in our 

underwear doing this and running the mimeograph machine, to run off these removal petitions 

and whatnot, and then we had to go serve them and whatnot. And it was, we didn't know what 

we were doing. We were just making it up. If you actually looked at the last time the Supreme 

Court had looked at civil rights removal, that is removal based upon a defense of a federal 

constitutional right, it was back in 1880. And fortunately we didn't know much about those 

cases, or we would've known that the Supreme Court had no interest in those. [laughter] But on 

the other hand, we decided, well, we'll try it. And so that was [our] first exposure to Mississippi.  

SK: [00:28:38] At least part of the reason you wanted to remove these cases from state 

courts was because of the behavior and the stated positions of some of the judges in those courts. 

MZ: Oh yeah. The prosecutors, the judges, the juries. We thought, and I think we were 

absolutely right, that we couldn't get a fair shake there. Mississippi in 1964, civil rights 

demonstrators, [whether] a judge trial or a jury trial, name your poison. And the prosecutors were 

going to push for the highest possible crime and [sentence]. We had a good run. What we would 

do is the federal judges, the district judges would throw us back to state court, “remand” is the 

technical term, but then we would go to the Fifth Circuit and we would get some kind of relief 

and then we'd toss it back to federal court and [continue]. I would say from 1964 and 1965 and 

1966, we had a good run of tying up these cases in federal court. And then in 1966, the Supreme 

Court put us out of business in the [City of Greenwood v.] Peacock case. There were two cases, 

[Georgia v.] Rachel, which Tony and I worked on, where we won the battle [but] lost the war 

because the companion case lost the war, the Peacock case in [19]66, and that put us out of 

business. But the great thing was that after all these years of tying these cases up in federal court 



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and their being tossed back to state court, once they got back to the state court, they magically 

disappeared. And that was because of what happened in [19]65, the Voting Rights Act.  

SK: [00:30:20] Can you talk just a bit more about the Peacock case? 

MZ: Well, that was not our case. I think it was, I think it was Kunstler’s case or 

[inaudible] case, and Rachel had the advantage [of having] unconstitutional state statute that was 

involved there that arguably at least promoted segregation, whereas there was no such statute in 

the Peacock case. And as a result, the Peacock case fell directly within the 1880 case I talked 

about. When the Supreme Court wrote the Peacock case in 1966, they relied upon this 1880 case 

that said, you can't do it. Fortunately, as I say, we hadn't [been deterred by] the 1880 case, but 

that put us out of business.  

SK: So, when you say put you out of business, what changed for you in 1966? Did you 

have to change your strategy? 

MZ: Oh yeah. By that time, we decided that getting cases in federal court would work 

better if we tried injunctions against suit. And so, we would try to enjoin the prosecution. So, 

once [19]66 had passed and we were out of business as far as a removal was concerned, we 

turned to injunctions. And there had been a case decided by the Supreme Court, a very 

ambiguous case called Dombrowski v. Pfister in 1965. And we pursued that for all it was worth. I 

mean, it actually was pretty narrow and was narrowed six years later in the Younger [v. Harris] 

case. But in [19]65, it was still ambiguous enough that we could make some hay out of that. So, 

we jumped from one horse to another.  

SK: [00:32:04] You noted one judge by name, William Howard Cox. It struck me, as a 

naive person who doesn't know much about the law, that I'm used to hearing dog whistles and 

veiled racial language that is increasingly, even veiled language is being pulled out, it’s being 



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unconstitutionally used, especially by prosecutors in jury selection. So, it was kind of shocking 

to the naive part of me that this judge seemed to be a particularly dedicated and public racist. Did 

you have much interaction with him?  

MZ: I had a number of cases before him, but I only had one conversation, and that was in 

the article, where one time [in chambers] he said, “It feels to me like you are using me as a 

waystation on the way to New Orleans” — with the Fifth Circuit. And I said, “Well, there's one 

way you can stop that.” [laughter] And he wasn't about to do that. But he knew what the game 

was, and we knew what the game was, which was he would turn us down, we’d go to New 

Orleans. The judges down there understood who Cox was. He was [James] Eastland’s former 

roommate. Talk about knowing a senator. He was a former roommate. Of course, Eastland and 

Cox were peas in a pod. They were both racist. But the thing is, the thing that was shocking in 

1964 is when you first went to Mississippi, all the signs. The “white” and “colored” signs, that 

was a shock. I mean, I’d never been South and they were all over, everywhere you went there 

were signs, “white” and “colored." And so, coming from that milieu, Cox, it would just be 

second nature to him to spew all of this garbage.  

SK: [00:33:57] And I do want to keep talking about 1964, but I'm curious to know if you, 

I assume you're going back and forth between Mississippi and New York? 

MZ: Exactly. Because Marian was in charge of the office. She was the boss. And from 

time to time she would, in fact, need some help. And I would come down. Later, she had more 

help, she had a hand from Henry Aronson and Mel Leventhal. And you talked to Mel. Mel 

started in the office. I can't quite remember it, was it [19]64 or [19]65? But it was later. In 

[19]64, Mississippi Freedom Summer, she needed more help. Later on, she had more help. And 

in fact, she had Paul and Iris Brest later on. And you’re going to talk to them. And she had Henry 



19 
 

 
  
 

Aronson. She had Mel Leventhal, so she had a lot of help. And she needed less of mine. But in 

[19]64, she definitely needed my help. And I came and helped to the extent I could. And that was 

true in [19]65, too. But after, [19]64 and [19]65 were the sum, the times when I went down 

mostly in Mississippi.  

SK: Did your experience with overt racism and segregation in Mississippi affect how you 

perceived what life was like in New York?  

MZ: No. It was two different worlds. I didn't have — I lived in New York, but the life I 

had in New York was — I had a small apartment near the law office so I could walk to work. 

And as I say, when I was in New York, I was working. I read The New York Times, but I wasn't 

really clued into what was going on in the city itself. I was more clued into what was going on in 

Mississippi. In fact, at one point, I considered myself, perhaps incorrectly, but I considered 

myself the greatest expert in Mississippi criminal procedure that there was. Because I had read 

everything. Because the one thing that Mississippi judges would want to do was to procedurally 

default you. What that means is lawyer talk for saying the lawyer made a mistake, and therefore, 

they forfeited, waived, whatever the verb is, the federal constitutional issue. And that was big, 

starting in the thirties. In the thirties, as lynching got less, procedural default grew up. And that 

was: “We’ll give them a trial, but it will be a pretty skimpy trial and then if they try to take an 

appeal, we’ll say whatever issue they had wasn’t properly raised, it should have been raised 

under this rule rather than that rule.” [00:36:33] They played the shell game a lot. And so what 

you had to do if you were going to, in fact, be dealing in Mississippi criminal law, you had to 

know Mississippi criminal procedure backwards and forwards. And so at a very early stage of 

my career, I realized that I was going to have to do it every which way there was so there could 



20 
 

 
  
 

never be a procedural default. And there never was in any of my cases. It was always a question 

of doing it right.  

SK: That’s fascinating. What you're describing is, is lynching ebbing as a way of 

controlling Black people and communities at a time when the law was able to step more 

forcefully into that role.  

MZ: Yes. There were two schools of thought and there were probably two in North 

Carolina, too. There was the law and order school and then there was hang-’em high school. And 

basically, the law and order school was not at all secretive about what they were doing because 

they wore the white hats. They thought of themselves as the good guys, “We're not like these 

ragamuffins over here who are lynching. What we want to do is do things according to law.” 

And that meant a speedy trial. You know, [inaudible] do you need defense counsel? So, you’ll 

appoint defense counsel that morning. You impanel a jury that afternoon. The next day you put 

on the evidence and then you get the verdict, the guilty verdict and sentence of death, all within a 

day or two or three at most, and then foreclose any appeal by saying it was arranged. Well, of 

course, counsel who were catapulted into a case at the last minute probably are not going to 

make the most articulate statement of the federal question. And so you can say, “Well, the 

federal question wasn't quite raised right.”   

SK: [00:38:22] I think I’ve seen dozens of North Carolina death penalty appeals brought 

to the state Supreme Court that rejected them because it said they were not perfected.  

MZ: Yes. That's been the traditional thing. Mississippi was really, Mississippi and 

Alabama were experts at this. And so, if you were in Mississippi or Alabama, you really had to 

know your criminal procedure. If you were a civil rights lawyer, that meant [in] part knowing 



21 
 

 
  
 

federal courts law, that meant knowing federal constitutional law, but it also meant knowing state 

procedure. You had to know your state procedure.  

SK: And so you were the Mississippi expert. Did LDF have experts in other southern 

states?  

MZ: Yes. There were three members of what was called the Demonstration Team and it 

kind of just grew up naturally. Since I had gone to Mississippi in [19]64 with Tony Amsterdam 

and worked on Schwerner’s cases, I fell naturally into being the Mississippi person. And then 

someone else had done Alabama and someone else was Georgia.  

SK: You mentioned working with Marian Wright, who we remember or know as Marian 

Wright Edelman. Can you talk a little bit about any experiences with personal interactions or 

working with her?  

MZ: [00:39:49] Oh, she was a delight to work with. She was very, very intense and very 

high powered. She always has been. And so, you could, you could really talk, talk, have good 

conversations with her. Plot out strategy. What were you going to do. And divide the labor. She 

didn’t, the thing about it is that you read about offices where there's backbiting going on and 

people were edging, sharp elbows and whatnot. We were all teammates. It was just a question of, 

okay, you take this, I'll take this, we'll do — and it was always cooperative. It was always 

cooperative. “Can you help on this?” “Yeah, I can help on that.”  

SK: So in 1966, and this is just as you are pivoting towards injunctions, you help in 

Grenada, Mississippi, with the Grenada County Freedom Movement. And this was an intense 

period of time in Grenada, for sure, that included at least one hairy experience that you have 

written about. Would you tell more about that night march? 



22 
 

 
  
 

MZ: Yes. SCLC wanted to do a night march. And I advised against that. I said, you're 

going to bring out all the crazies and you'll get casualties. It'll take casualties, and you won't be 

able to attribute any blame to any of these people. And I predicted there would be violence and it 

would be very hard to do. But they were dead set on doing this and they did it. And you had the 

Klan out there and they had these high-powered slingshots with metal projectiles. And it was like 

the Middle Ages, [where they] would shoot the arrows off. They were taking casualties left and 

right. And the state police were there standing around. And so, the only thing I could do was to 

threaten the head of the state police detachment and say, “Look, if you don't do something about 

it, I'm going to have you in federal court tomorrow.” Which was a bluff. Whether I could have 

him in federal court tomorrow [laughter], it didn’t work that way. And he did the right thing. I 

still remember looking at his badge, Giles Crisler. I still remember his name. I got fixated on that 

because [he] was going to be my defendant. And he had Colonel's insignia on. Colonel Giles 

Crisler would be the defendant. And I'd spend the night working on the complaint and trying to 

get to federal court and get something, and I didn't have to because he did the right thing.  

SK: [00:42:31] I think some people who aren't particularly familiar with the Civil Rights 

Movement might not understand what a night march really is and why activists would choose to 

march at night, which seems such a transparently dangerous time to do it. Can you talk just a 

little bit about that?  

MZ: No, I never understood it. I didn't understand why they did it because my lens was 

too narrow. I was thinking about they were going to take casualties. We're not going to be able to 

help them very much, and it's going to be a disaster. Why they were doing it, it was never 

apparent to me, so I can't testify to that. [laughter] 



23 
 

 
  
 

SK: And this also may be something that you can't testify to. But I'm curious because I 

was struck in learning a little bit about Grenada, about how little it seems to be part of the 

popular consciousness in the way that other sites of violence like Selma, for example, is. Do you 

have any thoughts on why that might be the case?  

MZ: No, I don't. I, I kind of parachuted in, did what legal work I could and when there 

didn't seem any legal work to be done, I parachuted out, or not parachuted out, drove out.  

SK: Do you remember what you were driving?  

MZ: No. [laughter] 

SK: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with the activists on the ground in 

Mississippi? I think many people know that attorneys were a hugely important part of the Civil 

Rights Movement, but I don't know that they understand what the relationship was like between 

people like Mickey Schwerner, for example, and Martin Luther King and others who had close 

relationships with attorneys.  

MZ: [00:44:02] Yes. Marian did that. I mean, as the boss, she would handle the political 

side of things. I didn't really get involved in that. To the extent that she was dealing with the 

organizations, she would do that. That was her lane. I stayed in my lane. So, I didn't do that. In 

the summer of [19]64, we had a lot of volunteer attorneys from the North. I would sometimes 

deal with the activists [and assign attorneys] when Marian wasn't around. I have a particular 

memory of dealing with Bob Moses. I don't know if you've heard of him. But he called up and 

asked for some lawyers to be sent, volunteer lawyers, to be sent to Natchez. And I said, 

“Natchez, that's incredibly dangerous. The Klan is so active in Natchez.” I said, “Just what do 

you want done? Legal work in Natchez?” And he explained what he wanted done, and it was 

totally insubstantial. There was no real legal work to be done. And I thought to myself, he just 



24 
 

 
  
 

wants to send some Northern lawyers to Natchez to get into great trouble. And that would help 

the movement. And I wasn't buying it. I didn't tell him what my reasoning was. I just said, “No, I 

don't have anybody available.” But I remember that very much. It was exceptional, because I 

didn't deal with Bob Moses except for that one time. And my suspicion was he had this ulterior 

purpose. He didn't really have a good legal problem there. And so, for the most part, that's an 

exception. As I say I didn't deal with Schwerner except for that one [phone] call. I talked to him 

on the phone. Obviously, he did have a legal problem. We said we were going to get on it. We 

were in our underwear in the office, cranking out mimeograph, the removal petitions. And other 

than that, that was the only conversation I ever had with Mickey Schwerner. 

SK: [00:46:15] You may have just answered this, but of course one of the most notable 

and scary, nationally known incidents around this time in Mississippi was the murder of Mickey 

Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and James Chaney not too long after he contacted you. Can 

you talk at all about that? 

MZ: Well, I knew only what was in the papers, but I knew right from the beginning, I 

knew that they were dead. Mississippians were [arguing that] the FBI sequestered them or 

somebody had sequestered them and it was all a hoax and whatnot. But I knew they were dead. 

And so, when the bodies turned up, it was no surprise. In terms of the trial, I didn't follow it that 

much. I assumed what the result would be. I didn't follow it that much. I was busy with other 

stuff. 

SK: So, one of the things that you were busy with, to more or less extent, was helping 

LDF with its role as general counsel to the SCLC, including issues that Dr. King, Dr. Martin 

Luther King, was raising there. Do you have any recollections about working with him and with 

the SCLC more generally?  



25 
 

 
  
 

MZ: Yes. One thing that pops to mind is more frivolous than anything else, was that I 

worked more with Andy Young on the legal side. Martin didn't really want to get too much 

involved in the [legal] details. And the times I had conversations with him he would just be 

impatient. I would be like the plumber who was saying, “Well, we got to order some copper pipe 

and it won't be here until next week and we’ll have to do this and that.” And it was that kind of 

conversation, except for that one conversation later, I would deal mostly with Andy Young. But I 

remember there was one time, whenever he would come to town [Mississippi], I would try to be 

there because I was on the Mississippi Demonstration Team. And so, I remember we had an 

appointment at such and such a time in a motel, at the motel they were staying at and I arrived at 

the appointed time and no Martin. And then an hour passed, no Martin. And then finally I did my 

business with Andy. [00:48:37] And about an hour later, Martin came down all disheveled. And I 

had the distinct feeling he had been having hanky-panky in the motel room. I mean, the way he 

walked in. That was, I thought about that. But on the other hand, I got the job done with Andy. 

Andy was much more focused on that. Martin could be distracted, especially when it came to the 

legal stuff. He relied upon Andy, he wanted Andy’s opinion, especially on legal stuff.  

SK: And there was a later meeting with Dr. King, I think you wrote that you maybe 

arrived late for a meeting and —  

MZ: Yes, that was all the way in [19]68. The Poor People's March started in Mississippi, 

and that's why I was involved in the Mississippi part. And that was easy as pie. The Mississippi, 

basically I was kind of like a [legal] advance man for the Poor People’s March [in Mississippi], 

and the mule trains and all that that were going to go through. And I would go to every place on 

their [journey] and talk to the mayor and the police, the police chief, and basically say, “You 

don't want them to stay in your [town], you want them to keep moving. So, let them keep 



26 
 

 
  
 

moving. And so, if they do something that violates ordinances, overlook it, you and I have the 

same, we have a community of interest here. We want to keep them moving. And you don't want 

them to stay and I don't want them to stay. I mean, more work for me. More work for you.” It 

was a very practical argument. They always bought it. There was never any problem [inaudible] 

going through Mississippi, [as] the Poor People's March went through Mississippi. But my 

advance work was, you know, months ahead of time, just to make sure that there was not going 

to be any problem along the way. So they, even if there was going to be a misunderstanding or 

something happened that was untoward, they were not going to get bogged down in some town 

because of something that happened. That was my interest and their interest, too. And I made it 

very clear that that was their interest as well as my interest.  

SK: [00:50:44] Were you working with local attorneys on the ground in Mississippi as 

well?  

MZ: Oh, yeah. But in doing the advance work in [19]68, I wasn’t. I was doing it myself. 

I didn't need local attorneys. Basically, the local attorneys we had back then, before Marian 

became a member of the bar, would basically sign off on the papers that we prepared. Carsie 

Hall and Jess Brown and Jack Young, and they were all on North Farish Street [in Jackson]. In 

fact, everyone was on North Farish Street, it was a bustling Black middle-class enterprise. The 

Legal Defense Fund office was there. All the other volunteer offices were on North Farish Street. 

We were at 538 and a half North Farish Street. Above a restaurant, which we always frequented 

to get our ribs. And Jess and Carsie and Jack, all had their offices along North Farish Street. And 

that was a tremendous responsibility because their diploma — their licenses were on the line 

because they were the ones who signed. And they had to depend on me to make sure that the 

stuff they were signing was legally watertight, that there was a good job done. There would be 



27 
 

 
  
 

no grounds for any kind of frivolous motion to strike or think that there was some bar rule 

violation. It had to be tight. And that was a big responsibility. [00:52:16] And I said in the article, 

the great fear was in screwing up, because if you screwed up, not only would the clients suffer, 

but [so would] one of the attorneys who was dependent on me to make sure that I'd done 

something, whatever they were signing was watertight, it had better damn well be watertight. 

SK: And was Reuben Anderson one of those local attorneys? 

MZ: He came later. No, he was not one of the local attorneys at that time. Jess and Carsie 

and Jack were in in the [19]60s. Reuben didn't come to be my intern until [19]68 or [19]69. And 

then when he went [back], I think I said in the article that once he was a member of the bar and 

he had been kind of trained in New York and he was now a civil rights “expert,” [and] there was 

no need for me. I figured my job was done. Mississippi was in good hands.  

SK: So, in 1968 as well, this is when you had this conversation with Martin Luther King 

in Atlanta. Can you talk a little bit about that?  

MZ: Yes, it was a very happenstance meeting because I came late and I was having my 

supper and I figured that he and the others were all in the meeting. This is planning the Poor 

People's March. And he came late and he was hungry. And so, we sat and talked [and ate]. 

Basically in the talk I gave at the law school, I said, you have to have the courage of your 

convictions, because he was being buffeted on all sides. [00:54:00] I mean, he was basically 

being attacked by the Black community for [his] antiwar efforts. He had given that Riverside 

speech in [19]67, and he was thought of as being passé. We had had the Black riots in Watts and 

Detroit and what not. And so, the Civil Rights Movement itself seemed to be passé. And he [had 

gone] to Memphis and there had been some rioters there who had gotten out of line and that that 

kind of discredited the movement and his movement. And so, he was in despair. He was just 



28 
 

 
  
 

trying to do his work. But he understood that things were running against him. He was being 

discredited in the Black community for not supporting the Vietnam War. And there were a lot of 

Blacks who did. And the white community thought his time had passed. And he had run into 

trouble in Memphis. The nonviolent campaign was being discredited because you had these 

hangers-on among the demonstrators who were interested in looting and arson and not [peaceful] 

demonstration, [but] using demonstrations as a cover. And so, the whole nonviolent movement 

that he was running was under some pressure, under a cloud. It was a lot to be desperate about. 

There was a lot on his plate. And most of the stuff was going against him.  

SK: I wonder what you think about the transformation of Martin Luther King in the 

minds of America broadly? I think a lot of people are still learning in elementary and high school 

that this was a transcendent, almost saint-like figure, who can unite people across racial lines. 

Yet, the Martin Luther King you’re describing in the mid and late 1960s is someone who was 

under a huge amount of pressure from lots of different directions. And, as you are saying, had 

been instrumental in these legal victories. But at the same time, people were wondering if his 

time had passed, and he was not a popular figure nationally. 

MZ: Yes, that's right. So if he had lived, I'm not sure what the movement would have 

come [to]. Because if he had lived, we saw that the Poor People's March didn't make it to 

Washington. It was just a fiasco. [00:56:30] Everyone agrees that the actual march on 

Washington was a fiasco. It was a muddy encampment. There was a lot of backbiting, a lot of 

internal divisions. It didn't accomplish anything. Finally it was scooped up and just wiped away. 

And it's kind of hard to think of what he would have done because what he was doing was 

considered passé. So I'm not sure what would [inaudible]. But [later], people decided he would 



29 
 

 
  
 

[become] the symbol of what we aspire to. It was an aspirational symbol, and that's what he 

became. He’s got a stamp, got a day, it was aspirational. 

SK: So, by, I should say in 1969, although you've worked on cases that have gone before 

the Supreme Court, I believe Davis v. Mississippi, is this the first time that you —  

MZ: Yes. I'd written lots of briefs, but finally I was senior enough that I could actually 

argue my own. I not only wrote the brief, but was able to argue it.  

SK: Can you talk about, I'm curious about the details of the case, but I'm also curious to 

know what the experience was like for you personally of crossing this major milestone.  

MZ: Okay. Which first? [laughter] 

SK: As the interviewer, I'm supposed to make these decisions? Why don't you talk about 

the case itself?  

MZ: [00:58:04] Basically, there [had] been a rape of a woman and the only clues they 

[the police] had were some fingerprints on a windowsill, and they figured it was some Black 

youth and they needed to match the fingerprints on the windowsill to somebody. And so, what to 

do? And so they had a dragnet of all these young Black men, depending on how you counted it, 

at least a couple of dozen. And they were all fingerprinted, at least a couple dozen were 

fingerprinted, there were others brought in for questioning. But Davis was [among those] 

brought in for questioning and fingerprinting, and then all the fingerprints were sent away. And 

voila, his fingerprints matched. This was before the days when it was understood there can be a 

lot of junk science in fingerprinting. But back then, it was regarded as holy writ. And so, defense 

counsel — I was not involved in the trial at all — defense counsel made a motion to suppress the 

fingerprints as fruit of an illegal search. The State argued, “Well, it’s fingerprints. The 

exclusionary remedy shouldn't apply to fingerprints.” And they made some similar arguments. 



30 
 

 
  
 

But that was the major one. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction, [and Davis 

was] sentenced to life. And that's when I got the case. The local lawyer sent it up to the Legal 

Defense Fund for the Supreme Court cert petition. I wrote the cert petition, I wrote the brief. And 

basically, my argument was simplicity itself, which was that [the police] you can't be allowed to 

do this kind of thing without repercussions. There’s got to be a remedy for this kind of violation 

of rights. You just can’t go out and dragnet a whole bunch of people and take their fingerprints 

and then expect that there'll be no repercussions. There's got to be some consequence in order to 

deter future such activities. [01:00:11] And the Court bought that, the Court thought that that 

seemed like a reasonable argument. There were two dissents, but the majority, the seven votes 

were, “Yeah, that sounds good to me.” In terms of my feelings about it, my feelings about it were 

gung-ho. After all, this is my chance. After watching all these arguments and doing all these 

moot courts for [other] lawyers, now I had my chance. The Legal Defense Fund tradition was 

you always went through moot courts. And I remember going through one at Columbia and one 

at NYU and one at Penn. I did three moot courts and I got harder questions there than I ever got 

before the Supreme Court. There were some really nifty questions. And so, when I came to 

argue, I figured the worst was behind me. There was nothing they could ask me that would be as 

hard as [what] I [had] already received. And I was right; the questions were relatively easy. I was 

really excited about doing it. It’s like somebody who's been preparing a speech for a long time 

and now gets a chance to make their speech. And by damn, I’m not going to miss my 

opportunity. And so I was just gung-ho.  

SK: So, for those who don't know, are these moot courts like rehearsal sessions?  

MZ: Yes, exactly. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Someone says, “Now we'll call this 

next case, Davis v. Mississippi, number such and such, Mr. Zarr, you may proceed.” And I get 



31 
 

 
  
 

up, “May it please the court,” and went through it. And in each of the moot courts, and this is 

what you're supposed to get, you get some really hellish questions by these law professors who 

are, who think that they can ask you a really tough question. And they do. And so, when [I] 

actually got up to make the actual argument, I didn’t get a question that was nearly as hard as the 

ones I got from the moot court people, the professors.  

SK: [01:02:12] Are there other cases that were meaningful to you that you want to recall 

here?  

MZ: Oh, you had mentioned the Singleton case. That was a school case. My involvement 

was not central, but when it came back on remand to the Fifth Circuit for proceedings after the 

Supreme Court decision, I was tasked to go down to New Orleans and present the argument for 

the Legal Defense Fund. But I didn't need to get up to argue because the court came in, and I 

remember Griffin Bell was on the court and he just did the talking. The court did the talking, I 

don't think I said anything. And they basically said, “Here's the way it’s going to go.” And that's 

the way it went. There were a number of cases that I worked on only in terms of maybe editing, 

polishing a brief, that I have no real memory of. I saw Tina Nadeau in the article had a long 

footnote with some of these cases, and in many of these cases my involvement was tangential. In 

a lot of the cases, it was central and I did the briefs and the argument. Mostly in the Fifth Circuit, 

that's where I mostly appeared, in the Fifth Circuit. Nothing earth shaking, as far as I can recall.  

SK: I'm trying to think of the right way to formulate this. So certainly there are attorneys 

who were working on very specific matters of law and procedure, and then there is presumably 

LDF leadership that was working on a broader legal strategy around big questions. 

Desegregation, the death penalty, other issues. Can you think out loud at all about the sort of 



32 
 

 
  
 

intersection or attention, as an attorney working on specific cases, but also maybe with your eyes 

cast up to this big strategy or not?  

MZ: [01:04:20] Well, all of us did some school cases. The school cases were so 

burdensome, so many. They were so factually sensitive, and we spread them around. All of us 

had a chance to work on school cases. It took up an enormous amount of time, and that was the 

whole idea of the Southern Strategy, which was to make you litigate district by district by 

district, school district by school district. So, all of us did those. We all pitched in. The was no 

grand strategy. I suppose there may have been some people in these school districts who thought, 

you know, “Desegregation maybe isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe we just want good 

schools.” Because sometimes desegregation led to Black teachers losing their jobs. And 

sometimes the parents thought, “Well, I don't mind my kid going to the Black school, as long as 

it is a good school.” And that kind of debate was above my pay grade. I mean, basically the 

policy of the Legal Defense Fund was, “We’re into desegregation. That's our, desegregation is 

us, and that's what we do.” These discussions [may have] happened, but it wasn't at my level. 

Now, I remember Derrick Bell later, after he left the Legal Defense Fund, had a lot of second 

thoughts about this, a lot of doubts about that. But he never, to my knowledge, expressed them in 

any staff meeting or to me. When I first went to the Legal Defense Fund, before I had my own 

office, I was sharing an office with Derrick. Very sweet guy. But he later became very bitter. 

Whenever I would run into him, at say some law teachers’ conference, he was always very 

friendly and amiable; but I would read the stuff he was writing and think, “God, I never got any 

inkling of that, that that was happening.” [01:06:26] In respect to capital punishment, we had 

Tony Amsterdam, Mike Meltsner, and Jack Himmelstein. They had their own team. I was part of 

the demonstration team. They were the capital punishment team. They didn't need me on the 



33 
 

 
  
 

capital punishment team. They had Tony. [laughter] But by this time, Tony was full time on the 

capital punishment team. He had long since left helping us on demonstrations. And so that was 

its own thing in itself. And then there was something called the National Organization for the 

Rights of the Indigent. NORI. And that was something that was grant-funded, and some of us 

helped on that. I remember I was tasked to go out to the West Coast, to Oregon, and work on 

Indigenous treaty fishing rights, and I brought a major case called Sohappy vs. Smith. I got a list 

of the possible plaintiffs. I went down the list and I found one of them was named “Sohappy.” 

And I thought, “Well, he’s my lead plaintiff. I'll never forget that name.” And it became a 

leading case on Columbia River Indigenous fishing rights. It was a successful case. But it was 

quite off [our] mainstream. I mean, it was basically, we had gotten all this grant money and so 

we did that. So, indigenous rights was one thing.  

SK: [01:07:52] You mentioned earlier in our conversation that everyone has an Anthony 

Amsterdam story. And yours might be being in your underwear in Mississippi, but if there's 

another one, I want to give you the opportunity to share it. 

MZ: Oh. There were so many times that in dealing with Tony, I remember he would 

come up with an idea that was so brilliant and you would just want to be able to write it down 

and not miss a word because you knew you were going to end up, that whatever he [had just] 

said was going to end up in the draft. I would be tasked with, a lot of time with drafting it. And 

so Tony would speak and I would [try to] take good notes. And I, that was my dominant 

impression which would be, take damn good notes when he speaks. Because when you come to 

write the brief, it's going to end up there somehow or other. You may, you may rephrase it or do 

something, but it would essentially be his idea. He was bursting with ideas. That was the thing 

about Tony that was so amazing, he was somebody who had such great ideas in such profusion.  



34 
 

 
  
 

SK: So, in 1970, you leave LDF. 

MZ: [19]69, actually, the fall of [19]69. And I started at the Mass. Law Reform Institute, 

and that was pretty tame stuff compared to what I’d done on the Legal Defense Fund. You didn't 

have [to battle] vicious prosecutors or hostile judges, you had a legislature that would listen, you 

had [state] courts that would listen, et cetera. So, it was quite a different [world] than [at] the 

Legal Defense Fund. 

SK: It strikes me that it must have been a very tiring six years for you.  

MZ: I didn't feel that way at the time. Looking back, now that I'm 87, and looking back at 

all the work I did, I think, boy, oh boy, I was a real energizer bunny. Nowadays, I marshal my 

energy to teach my classes, and that takes up a lot of [my] energy. 

SK: [01:10:09] It absolutely does. So, can you talk a little bit about how, and I do, of 

course, want to hear about your career after LDF, but thinking about the lessons that you learned 

there and how you've applied them over the course of your career since then, how did LDF shape 

your career?  

MZ: Yes, that's question number 17. I paused over that because it was an opportunity to 

think in a way that I hadn't really thought about it before. I wrote it down. I said that the six years 

of the Legal Defense Fund influenced the rest of my 50-plus year career. And I counted six ways 

and I wrote it down because I didn't want to forget any of them. Number one, I encountered in 

Mississippi all sorts of really mischievous prosecutors, prosecutors who wanted to hang them 

high who were in fact, very unfair and unjust. And so, one of the things when I got to Maine Law 

was to teach a course that, even though it was titled something very innocuous, like criminal 

procedure, was really a course about prosecutorial musts and shoulds and must nots and should 

nots. It was about prosecutorial ethics and the law governing prosecutors. And so, the —   



35 
 

 
  
 

SK: I’m sorry to interrupt.  

MZ: Go ahead. 

SK: This was about teaching future prosecutors to behave properly instead of teaching 

other attorneys to deal with mischievous prosecutors?  

MZ: Exactly that, about teaching prosecutors to do the right thing and be progressive 

prosecutors, even though they didn't use the term. I taught that course for over 40 years and most 

of the DA’s and assistant DA’s and the AG took the course. The present governor was an A.G. 

and district attorney, and she took the course. And over the years it's been very influential. And I 

think the reason I taught, I was so invested in the course was because I had seen in my 

experience in the six years with LDF what prosecutors could do badly. [01:12:21] And I wanted 

our prosecutors to do well. And I think that was influential. So that was one thing, that I taught 

that course, and it did have an influence. The second thing was that I’d seen a lot of bad judges 

and bad judging. And so when I had an opportunity to do some judging myself by being a federal 

magistrate judge, I took it. And I was a federal magistrate judge for five years from [19]77 to 

[19]82 and tried to do the right thing. Didn't set high bails or unreasonably high bails and things 

like that. George Mitchell has a memoir discussing his time as prosecutor, he discusses how I set 

bail for some drug mules that was quite reasonable and he thought they should be kept in jail. 

And I thought, “Well, they're just mules.” And in the book, he badmouths me about having set 

unrealistically low bail and he and I talked about it, we both got a laugh out of it. That was while 

I was magistrate judge, [and] he was U.S. attorney. But then he hopscotched me and became a 

judge in 1980. So I was magistrate while he was a U.S. attorney and then he became judge, then 

he left the judgeship to run for the Senate. Number three, I encountered a lot of bad criminal 

laws. And so, for 40-plus years, I not only taught the course in criminal law, but I was a 



36 
 

 
  
 

consultant to the Maine legislature on criminal law bills. And I think I [helped] shortstop a lot of 

bills that would have been bad criminal law bills and improved some that did pass, made them 

more passable. [01:14:23] So that was an influence. Number four, I encountered a lot of unfair 

and unjust criminal procedure rulings. So, for 40-plus years, I was a consultant to the Maine 

Supreme Court on rules of criminal procedure, helping to draft rules that would be [fair and] 

understandable, [and] would not [lead to] procedural defaults. You have to be pretty unknowing 

to do a procedural default under our criminal rules; they are very clear and more understandable, 

made things fairer, I thought. [Number five], in terms of criminal sentencing, harsh criminal 

sentencing, I took the opportunity to serve on the Maine Parole Board for four years. Again, 

trying to make things fairer. And then number six, these are all things where I think I was 

influenced by the six years I had at the Legal Defense Fund. Early on, [I took over] the course in 

federal courts. By [19]75 I was teaching the course. It had come unstuck from somebody and I 

immediately grabbed it and said, “I'm not leaving this.” And I continue to teach it to this day and 

I'm teaching it now. This morning I was working on class prep. And my aim there was to try to 

make federal courts a more understandable, less mysterious course. And Gail will tell you, I've 

been working on it for nearly 50 years. The problem is it's intrinsically difficult. [01:16:11] 

There are a lot of doctrines in criminal law, federal courts law, that are intrinsically difficult and 

trying to make it more accessible, trying to make it easier, is a tough task. And every year I redo 

the materials, trying to make it more understandable. And I never succeed entirely. There are 

always [students] who come away from the course thinking it's a mystery course. But my 

evaluations, for the most part, say it's a life-altering course. That it’s a really good course. And so 

that all stems from my time at the Legal Defense Fund. I knew I was not an “expert.” I knew my 

understanding of federal courts was superficial, [that] I had no deep understanding of federal 



37 
 

 
  
 

courts. Fortunately, I didn't need to because the opposition was not tasking us with anything hard 

and the judges didn't seem that interested anyways. And so, a lot of times I'll think back and I'll 

think, “I could have done such a better job in this case or that case if I’d really had a deeper 

understanding. But all I had was a superficial understanding.” I got by. I was able to do it. 

Interestingly enough, at this late date, if you ask me about all the successes, and there were 

many, I have a very dim memory of that. But the failures, the ones where I now think, “Oh, I 

could have argued this or this is a better way to handle it. Now that I understand the subject 

better, I could have done better.” Those are fresher in my mind than any successes. Fortunately, I 

didn’t screw up so badly that anything really bad happened. But thinking back, I think now, 

“Now that I understand this, I could have done such a better job in this, that, or the other.” And 

so it's a continuing thing. And so I was glad for the opportunity to sit down and write out these 

six things that the Legal Defense Fund experience had on my career.  

SK: [01:18:17] It seems that certainly one way to address the strange freshness of those 

failures is through teaching, is through giving future lawyers the tools to avoid mistakes or to 

educate themselves better about one point of law or another. 

MZ: Yes. Teaching has been very educational for me. [laughter] I get a fresh insight into 

how, and I always get fresh insights into how to do this. Gail says, every summer I redo the 

materials for the next Fall and she’ll say, “Why aren’t last year's materials good enough?” And 

I’ll say, “Well, I’ve got some new ideas.” “New ideas about old stuff?” “Yeah, I have some new 

ideas about old stuff.” And obviously there are new cases and I add those, but I get new insights 

into old stuff. I guess like someone who teaches Shakespeare finds from time to time that they 

have a new take on something that they read and taught about for years and years and years and 



38 
 

 
  
 

then you see something you didn't see before. You say, “Hot damn, how about that? How come I 

never thought of that?” And, well, you teach. You know the experience.  

SK: Absolutely. And the unique self-torture that is redoing the class every year that you 

could just teach exactly as you taught it the previous time. But that's what keeps you learning and 

growing and makes you a better teacher and scholar than you would be otherwise. 

MZ: It keeps me at it. If I ever got to a point, which I think I'll never get to, where I 

[think], “Well, that's that.” [laughter] I don't foresee ever getting to a point where it's “that’s 

that.” At some point I'll lose my marbles and I won't be able to teach anymore. But until then, I'm 

going to not have the “that’s that” feeling.  

SK: [01:20:05] You've mentioned progressive prosecutors a couple of times in our 

conversation. And for those of us who just watch legal developments from the sidelines, this is a 

fairly new conversation. A progressive prosecutor elected in Philadelphia, elected, recalled in 

San Francisco, sometimes blamed for higher, high rates of crime. I'm just curious to hear from 

your perspective as someone who might have been one many years ago and perhaps has 

educated many of them. What do you think about the conversation around prosecution and harsh 

punishments and sort of what direction do you see us moving right now?  

MZ: Well, I think the progressive prosecutor has got to be less [publicly] self-

congratulatory. And so, I think, for example, the former students, are prosecutors in Portland and 

Augusta, and used to go down the list. [My] former students are all over as assistants or DAs, 

and none of them are “progressive prosecutors” in capital letters. But [they] make low visibility 

decisions that are fairer. That doesn't mean you give the courthouse away. But you think hard 

about, “Do I really want the max here? Can I cut a deal and do something that's fair?” And so I'm 

very pleased that [virtually all] of the prosecutors here don’t get into trouble in terms of 



39 
 

 
  
 

[discovery] and Brady material and that kind of thing. Don’t play tricks that get them into 

trouble. Do things that garner the respect of the defense bar. I'm very proud of the prosecuting 

bar as a whole here. There are [maybe] a few bad apples, but there always are. But as a run of the 

mill idea, the DAs and the assistant DAs, and the assistant AGs do a really good job and are 

thoughtful about what is fair. And they — because I also, I always ask them the question, “Is that 

fair? You can do that. The rule permits you to do that. But is that fair?”   

SK: [01:22:15] So, you went from Massachusetts to Cambridge to New York to 

Mississippi back to New York to Massachusetts at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. And 

then you joined the faculty at Maine School of Law. How did you end up at Maine School of 

Law?  

MZ: Happenstance. A lawyer. Actually, there was a lawyer that I’d worked with on the 

Columbia River fish case. He was a lawyer practicing in Oregon, and he had since gone to teach 

at Maine Law. And one day he called up and he said, “We’re looking for somebody, you know 

anybody who might be interested in teaching?” And that set off an alarm bell in the back of my 

head, because ever since I was a law student, [as] I told you, I had the conceit that I could do 

better than most of the professors I had. And I said, “Sure, I'll do it.” And so, I went and 

interviewed up here and got the job. I ended up teaching civil procedure because I’d had this 

great professor named Al Sacks at Harvard, one of the few great professors. I ended up teaching 

criminal procedure because I was interested in doing the prosecution, doing work with the 

would-be prosecutors. Ended up teaching substantive criminal law. And that tied in with my 

work with the legislature. And then I taught federal courts. So I had four front-line courses for at 

least 40 years straight, and I was like a very protective bird sitting on my nest. These were great 



40 
 

 
  
 

courses. I didn’t want to give them up to anybody and I didn’t move. I sat on them for at least 40 

years.  

SK: And somewhere along the way you met Gail?  

MZ: [01:24:15] Yes, I met her in 1969.  

SK: So, was this in Massachusetts?  

MZ: Well, actually, she was living in Massachusetts and I was living in New York and 

we met in New York and then we got married in 1971. So, we've been married for 52 years.  

SK: Not too shabby.  

MZ: Thank you.  

SK: Are there other people at the Inc. Fund who you want to remember? 

MZ: Yes. Steve Ralston and I were very close, and he was a really good guy. I hope 

you're going to talk to him at some point. Is he on your list? 

SK: I hope so. 

MZ: And, of course, Mike Meltsner was there. Bill Turner. I helped Bill get the job at the 

Legal Defense Fund. He was working for a big Wall Street firm and dissatisfied and I [suggested 

he] come work with us. And are you going to talk to Bill? Is he on the list? He lives in Berkeley 

now. He's retired. 

SK: I don't exactly recall but I have written his name down. 

MZ: Of course you can't talk to Jack or Jim or Leroy or Norman, and Derrick's gone. So, 

just thinking of all the people in the [19]60s. Mike Davidson. He was one of the people in the 

[19]60s. Bill Robinson, the [19]60s. Drew Days came at the end, but now he's gone. Conrad 

Harper came at the end. Conrad is still living in New York. He went to a big firm and was a 



41 
 

 
  
 

partner in a big firm for a number of years in the [19]60s. Who else? [pauses] Those are the 

people who come to mind. You definitely want to talk to them. 

SK: Are there other questions that I should have asked you that I didn't?  

MZ: No, I think you did a great job. You asked a whole bunch of great questions. I'm 

particularly thankful for question number 17 because it forced me to sit down and think about the 

various [influences] from the Legal Defense Fund on my career. I didn't have any occasion to 

actually do that. No one has asked my opinion on that. So I've never had an occasion to actually 

sit down and say, “Hmm, what are the things that came about from the Legal Defense Fund 

experience that shaped my career?” And that question, number 17 asked it, I said, “Well, I better 

answer it.” 

SK: [laughter] Absolutely. Well, we'll end on a high note. This has been such a pleasure. 

Thank you so much. 

MZ: And thank you. [01:27:04] 

[END OF INTERVIEW]