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Note: By Bart Barnes February 8, 1995 David Luke Norman, 70, a former D.C. Superior Court judge who also served as chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during the Nixon administration, died of pneumonia Feb. 6 at the Washington Home Hospice. He had a degenerative brain disorder.
Judge Norman served on the D.C. Superior Court from 1973 until he retired in 1983. He acquired a reputation as an unorthodox judicial activist who often dissented from positions taken by his colleagues on the Superior Court bench.
As a veteran lawyer in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, he played a pivotal role in developing the legal basis for voting-rights cases that led to the enfranchisement of thousands of black voters in the deep South. But as assistant attorney general in charge of the division in 1971 and 1972, he was caught in a cross-fire between civil rights groups that wanted an aggressive enforcement policy and high figures in the Nixon administration who preferred a less aggressive stance.
He was one of six top Justice Department officials to resign after Nixon's reelection in 1972. At the time, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler said he would be offered a "high judicial post." The position turned out to be a judgeship on the D.C. Superior Court.
Judge Norman was born in Stromsburg, Neb. As a youth, he severely damaged his eyesight looking at a partial eclipse of the sun, and he attended the Nebraska School for the Blind. After graduation, he moved to California, where he worked during World War II on an assembly line at Lockheed Aircraft Co. in Burbank in an "employ the handicapped" program that was part of the war effort.
While he was at Lockheed, the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation determined that he had "academic potential," and he received state financial assistance to attend the University of California-Berkeley, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He was third in his class at Boalt Hall law school there.
He was able to read with the assistance of special optical devices. Later, secretaries sometimes read material aloud to him.
In 1956, directly out of law school, Judge Norman came to Washington and joined the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. In 1957, when the Civil Rights Division was created under President Eisenhower, he transferred to that unit.
In the Kennedy administration, Judge Norman devised methods for making detailed analyses of voting records in southern states that the Justice Department used to prove racial discrimination in voting rights cases.
Later, as a deputy to civil rights chief John Doar, he developed the "freezing theory" in voting discrimination cases. This theory blocked voting registrars from holding blacks to a higher standard of literacy than that of the least-qualified white voter in past practices. In essence, the minimum level was "frozen" at that of the least-qualified white. The Supreme Court upheld this line of reasoning in 1966.
On the D.C. Superior Court, Judge Norman was known for imposing alternative sentences and for his tendency to stray from judicial norms. He once sentenced a man to the "three hours the defendant spent in the court system" after finding him guilty of disorderly conduct.
He ruled that luxury apartment dwellers could withhold rent money when their air conditioning failed to work, and he declared the District's marijuana laws unconstitutional. He declared police policies of arresting female prostitutes to be discriminatory because the prostitutes' male customers were not arrested. He also declared laws against "soliciting for lewd and immoral purposes" and "indecent proposals" to be discriminatory because they were enforced disproportionately against homosexuals.
His marriage to Maxine Norman ended in divorce.
Survivors include his companion, Monica Gallagher of Washington; a daughter from his marriage, Nancy Davies of New York; five sisters; and two brothers.
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https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6866&context=ylj
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