Tribute: Matthew Zwerling ’64

HISTORY MAKER: Zwerling was featured on the cover of the May–June 2014 issue of Review, part of a story on his experience with Mississippi Freedom Summer 50 years after the project. (Photo: Alison Yin/AP Images for the University of Rochester)

Those of us who knew Mat Zwerling ’64 were deeply impressed by his quiet but unwavering dedication to human rights. Mat, who died this March, represented all that was good about the University—a kind and wise friend, a true scholar, and a person committed to making the world ever better.

Ever since high school, Mat was involved in efforts to advance justice for all Americans.

Mat and many other young people helped register Black voters in Mississippi as part of the Freedom Summer Project, an experience that convinced him his calling was the law rather than his original idea of medicine. His Freedom Summer work is memorialized through several photos of him in the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

After Rochester, Mat graduated from Yale Law School and clerked in the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. He went on to a distinguished career as a law professor and lifelong advocate for ensuring that accused defendants had adequate representation in court.

He worked as a public defender in Washington, DC, and was chosen to lead the National Lawyers Guild Grand Jury Project to provide guidance to lawyers representing antiwar protesters.

After several years as a law professor at Catholic University Law School and the University of San Francisco Law School, Mat was selected to lead the First District Indigent Appeals Program in California, guiding lawyers to elevate the quality of their indigent appellate representation.

Mat received a number of awards for his life of dedicated public service. He is an alumnus of whom we can all be proud.

—Peter Standish ’64, Bob Calhoun ’64, Ted Parker ’64, Ned Clarke ’64, David Feldman ’64, Stuart Levison ’64, and Will Roblin ’66