He wasn’t Catholic and he wasn’t black, but law professor John R. Kramer was so incensed about the deep-rooted poverty in black New Orleans, exposed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that his family held his funeral at St. Augustine’s Church, the oldest predominantly African American parish in New Orleans, now scheduled for closure.

Kramer, who died March 7 at 68, was a former associate dean and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, as well as dean of the law school at Tulane. The Washington Post reports on Kramer’s career as an outspoken liberal who pioneered the establishment of legal clinics to train law students and serve poor people both at Georgetown and at Tulane. Under his leadership, Tulane became the first law school in the United States to require a specific number of community service hours for graduation, and African American students came to constitute a greater percentage of the law school student body than any other law school that wasn’t historically black.

He was born in New York and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He clerked for Thurgood Marchall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and was later counsel to Adam Clayton Powell.

“John Kramer lived life large and exuberant,” says Wally Mlyniec, his successor as associate dean at Georgetown. The Post also treats us to several examples from his wide range of clients, including the National Pork Producers (to allow them to call pork the other white meat) and the United Gamefowl Breeders of America (to preserve cockfighting in Louisiana).