Christopher Edley Jr., Civil Rights Expert Heard by Presidents, Dies at 71
He pivoted between serving as an adviser to the Carter, Clinton and Obama White Houses and teaching at Harvard and Berkeley, where he was the law school dean.
Christopher Edley Jr., a civil rights expert and policy adviser who worked closely with three Democratic presidents and six presidential campaigns and served as an innovative dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, died on Friday in Stanford, Calif. He was 71.
His wife, Maria Echaveste, a deputy chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was complications of surgery.
Though he spent most of his career in teaching, including 23 years at Harvard Law School, his alma mater, Mr. Edley’s career spanned the academic-political divide.
In the late 1970s, he worked for the White House domestic policy staff, specializing on issues like food stamps, child welfare and disability for President Jimmy Carter. Over a decade later, he took a leave from Harvard to be an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton.
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Both roles came after working as a top Democratic campaign adviser, a role he also performed for Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Howard Dean and Barack Obama.
In all cases he was known as a stalwart advocate for liberal policies on race, especially affirmative action, a position that often put him at odds with Democratic centrists eager to moderate the party’s civil rights stance.
When, in 1995, Mr. Clinton named Mr. Edley to oversee a review of affirmative action under the slogan “mend it, don’t end it,” Mr. Edley made sure that very little mending was necessary. And he resisted pressure from inside the White House to engage with critics of affirmative action and other civil rights issues, whom he dismissed as dangerously disingenuous.
In 1991, he joined three other Black professors from top-tier law schools in testifying against the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, arguing that Justice Thomas — then a federal appeals court judge — was too much of a political partisan to make fair decisions, a charge that he lobbed at many other Black conservatives.
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“Though their opposition to these measures is framed as principle,” he said of critics of affirmative action, writing in The Atlantic in 1997, “certainly their real goal is to protect the current distribution of privilege and opportunity that has produced white-male elites in virtually every sector.”
By then he had returned to Harvard. Alarmed at a looming court case that seemed to threaten affirmative action in college admissions, Mr. Edley and a colleague, Gary Orfield, convened an emergency group of college presidents to discuss their plans should the courts dismantle racial preferences in education.
They found there were no plans, and in fact very little information about the state of civil rights and race-related policy in general. In response, Mr. Edley and Mr. Orfield founded the Civil Rights Project, which over the years has generated dozens of influential books, papers and conferences and become a model for creating research programs within law schools.
Mr. Edley did something similar after becoming dean of the Berkeley law school in 2004. He initiated a series of policy-oriented centers within the school focusing on issues like the environment and technology. He also greatly expanded the school’s classroom space and library and created grants and fellowships to support students interested in public-interest careers.
“He was really a transformative dean,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the current dean and a classmate of Mr. Edley’s at Harvard Law.
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Mr. Edley stepped down as dean of Berkeley law in 2013 to deal with treatment for prostate cancer. He returned to teaching in 2016, and in 2021 was interim dean of the university’s school of education.
Christopher Fairfield Edley Jr., was born on Jan. 13, 1953, in Boston, where his father, Chris Edley Sr., was completing legal studies at Harvard. His mother, Zaida (Coles) Edley, was an actress and speech therapist.
Christopher grew up in Philadelphia and New Rochelle, N.Y., following his father’s career as a prosecutor, program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund.
He graduated with a degree in mathematics and economics from Swarthmore College in 1973, then enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he became the first second-generation Black student in the institution’s history. He took a leave of absence in 1976 to work for Mr. Carter’s presidential campaign, then joined the Carter White House after graduating in 1978, receiving both a law degree and a master’s in public policy.
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After Mr. Carter lost re-election, Mr. Edley joined the faculty at Harvard Law, where he developed a specialty in education, civil rights and administrative law. Among his students was Mr. Obama.
Mr. Edley’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He met Ms. Echaveste while both were involved with the Clinton White House; they married in 1999. Along with her, he is survived by his son from his second marriage, Christopher Edley III; two children with Ms. Echaveste, Elias and Zara; a grandson; and his sister, Judith Edley.
While remaining at Berkeley as dean, Mr. Edley worked closely as an adviser to the Obama campaign, then joined the inner ranks of the transition team. But he resisted entreaties to join yet another White House team, preferring to remain focused on civil rights issues in California.
“This was ground zero for the opportunity struggle that defines the civil rights agenda,” he told The New York Times in 2007. “The challenges in education, health care, immigration, the criminal justice system, here in California, capture what the battle for racial and ethnic justice is today.”
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