David Carliner; Active in Unpopular Causes

In 1952, a Chinese immigrant named Ham Say Naim married a woman in North Carolina and settled in Virginia. Two years later, she sought an annulment on the grounds that interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia.

Mr. Carliner argued that the anti-miscegenation law violated the Constitution, but in 1955 the Virginia Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state had the right to "preserve the racial integrity of its citizens" and "to regulate the marriage relation so that it shall not have a mongrel breed of citizens."

The U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down Virginia's interracial marriage ban in 1967.

From 1957 to 1960, Mr. Carliner filed a series of suits to overturn Virginia's prohibition on integrated seating at public events. In 1960, Arlington County schools finally allowed blacks and whites to sit together at public meetings.

After losing in the lower courts, Mr. Carliner won a landmark decision in 1965 when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a federal employee was wrongfully fired after he was arrested for soliciting gay sex in Lafayette Square.

In 1966, Mr. Carliner defended Yale professor Staughton Lynd, whose passport had been seized after he visited Cuba and North Vietnam. Mr. Carliner ultimately won broader rights for U.S. citizens to travel overseas.

In 1979, after President Jimmy Carter ordered federal agents to compile dossiers on 50,000 Iranian students in the United States, Mr. Carliner took up their cause and got the order rescinded.

In 1977, Mr. Carliner found himself embroiled in a legal case of his own when he tried to buy a house on Reno Road NW in Washington. When the owners sold to another family, Mr. Carliner sued, citing a conversation in which the homeowner told Mr. Carliner's real estate agent, "I'll let the house stand there and rot before I sell it to those Jews."

In the end, Mr. Carliner got the house.

Mr. Carliner was the founding chairman of the International Human Rights Law Group, which trained international human rights activists. He was the author of "The Rights of Aliens: The Basic Guide to an Alein's Rights," and was a member of the Cosmos Club.

He retired from his law firm, Carliner & Remes, in 2003.

His wife of 50 years, Miriam Carliner, died in 1994.

Survivors include two children, Geoffrey Carliner of Newton, Mass., and Deborah Carliner of Washington; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.