Marshall, Louis

Marshall, Louis (1856–1929) lawyer, civic leader; born in Syracuse, N.Y. Educated in public schools and at Columbia Law School (1877), he practiced in Syracuse, N.Y., and, from 1894, in New York City, where he became a notable for his defense of minorities in civil rights cases. He also accepted many immigration and labor cases and he successfully argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. A cofounder of the American Jewish Committee, he attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and worked to get antidiscrimination clauses into various treaties. He helped Jewish refugees settle in Palestine in the 1920s, in hopes that the country, then a British protectorate, would become a permanent homeland for Jews.