Stephen Carter

Stephen Lisle Carter (born October 26, 1954) is an American legal scholar who serves as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

He writes on legal and social issues.

Carter was born in Washington, D.C., the second of his parents' five children.

He was raised in a family committed to public service.

His mother worked as an executive assistant for Julian Bond and M. Carl Holman of the National Urban Coalition.

An attorney turned administrator, his father was executive director of the Washington Urban League, and later a vice president at Cornell University.

Carter's grandfather was a successful dentist in Harlem and his grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter, was the first black woman to be a district attorney in New York state.

His great-grandmother was the suffragist and activist Addie Waites Hunton.

Carter graduated from Ithaca High School in 1972, and his essay "The Best Black" is based in part on his experiences there.

At Ithaca High School, he was the editor-in-chief of The Tattler, and pushed hard for student representation on the local school board.

Carter earned his B.A. in history from Stanford University in 1976.

At Stanford he served as managing editor for The Stanford Daily.

Carter received a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979.

At Yale, he won the prize for best oralist in the Thurmond Arnold Moot Court Competition and served as a note editor on the Yale Law Journal.

Following graduation from Yale, Carter served as a law clerk for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and, subsequently, for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall from 1980 to 1981.

Currently, Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he has taught since 1982.

At Yale, he teaches courses on contracts, evidence, professional responsibility, ethics in literature, intellectual property, and the law and ethics of war.

Carter has received eight honorary degrees, including Bates College, Colgate University, Hamilton College, and the University of Notre Dame.

In 1994, he delivered the commencement speech at Stanford University.

Carter's non-fiction books have received praise from voices across the political spectrum, from Marion Wright Edelman to John Joseph O'Connor.

Carter's first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent 11 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in 2002.

It won both the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (Fiction) and the 2003 BCALA Literary Award, from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association., with further nominations for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction, the CWA New Blood Dagger from the Crime Writer's Association, and the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, in the mystery/thriller category.

His second novel, New England White, and third, Palace Council, form a trilogy of sorts with The Emperor of Ocean Park, all being set in the fictional New England town of Elm Harbor, with some characters from each book appearing in the others.

His fourth novel, Jericho's Fall, was published in July 2009.

His book, The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama, was published in 2011.

In August 2014, The Globe and Mail tagged Carter's Back Channel as one of "five new crime novels worth a read."

Carter's work is seen frequently on the op-ed pages of major newspapers.

In addition to his policy writings and novels, Carter for several years wrote a feature column in Christianity Today magazine, and he has been quoted in the media on religion in public life.

He is currently a Bloomberg View columnist at Bloomberg.com.

Carter was raised in Harlem, in Washington, D.C., and in Ithaca, New York.

He and his wife, Enola G. Aird, have two children.

They reside in Connecticut and summer in Martha's Vineyard.

They attend St. Luke's Episcopal Church, one of the oldest predominantly black Episcopal churches in the country.