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How did Thurgood Marshall use the law to advance civil rights in the United States?

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illustration from Charles Dickens's Bleak House — Legal ethics Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne for Charles Dickens's *Bleak House*. Here Lady Dedlock is visited by her cunning old lawyer, who discovers her deepest secret and threatens to reveal it to her husband.

Thurgood Marshall utilized the law as a powerful vehicle for social change, famously arguing that the U.S. Constitution must be made to work for all citizens. As a lawyer for the NAACP, he challenged systemic inequality by leveraging the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.1

His strategy involved:
* Strategic Litigation: Marshall won 29 of 32 cases before the Supreme Court, dismantling the "separate but equal" doctrine. This included landmark victories against racial exclusion in primary elections, housing, and graduate education.1
* Evidence-Based Advocacy: In Brown v. Board of Education, he combined legal arguments with psychological and sociological data to demonstrate the harmful effects of racial segregation on children.1
* Judicial Philosophy: As a Supreme Court Justice, he advocated for a "sliding scale" interpretation of the equal protection clause. This approach sought to provide more equitable protection for disadvantaged groups by considering a wider range of factors than the Court’s traditional "tiered" scrutiny.1

Marshall’s career remains a testament to the ethical imperative of using legal systems to pursue justice and dismantle institutionalized discrimination.1