Marshall, Louis (1856–1929)

US lawyer and civic leader. Educated in public schools and at Columbia Law School (1877), he practised in Syracuse, New York, and, from 1894, in New York City, where he became notable for his defence of minorities in civil rights cases. He also accepted many immigration and labour cases and he successfully argued many of these before the US 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 the hope that the country, then a British protectorate, would become a permanent homeland for Jews. Marshall was born in Syracuse, New York.