Lawyer who helped legalize interracial marriage dies at 93

William D. Zabel helped write an amicus brief for the American Civil Liberties Union in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case decided on June 12, 1967, that unanimously struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He considered that work his proudest accomplishment. His career included high-profile divorce cases and Wall Street litigation.

The case ended state bans across the country and became the civil-rights precedent Zabel later identified as one of the two most important achievements of his legal life, alongside co-founding Schulte Roth & Zabel in 1969.

By 1965, Zabel had published an Atlantic article, “Interracial Marriage and the Law,” arguing against the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation statutes. In his Harvard Law School reflections, Zabel wrote that his thinking was sharpened after a case involving a wealthy New York businessman who disinherited his daughter for marrying an African American man. After law school, Zabel traveled to Mississippi to support civil-rights workers, and as an undergraduate at Princeton he and his roommate petitioned the FBI to look more deeply into the acquittal of the men who killed Emmett Till.

Zabel later negotiated the $7.2 billion settlement from the estate of Jeffry Picower in the Madoff recovery effort. Harvard Law School called it the largest civil judgment against an individual in American jurisprudence at the time. The money helped restore losses to victims of Madoff’s fraud, and the Madoff Victim Fund made final payments to customers in 2025.

Human Rights First renamed its annual award after William D. Zabel, and Princeton established the William D. Zabel ’58 Professorship of Human Rights in his honor.