Charles L. Black Jr., a leading scholar of constitutional law who influenced national policy and thought on such contentious issues as desegregation, presidential impeachment and the death penalty, died at his home in Manhattan on May 5 after a long illness.

Professor Black, who was 85, was a member of the Yale faculty for three decades. At the time of his death, he was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law. He is best known for his role in the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended school segregation and for his "Impeachment: A Handbook," which served for many Americans as a trustworthy analysis of the law of impeachment during the Watergate scandal and again during the 1999 proceedings against President Bill Clinton.

Among colleagues, friends and students, Professor Black was known as a Renaissance man because of his expansive interests and expertise. He wrote poetry, created sculpture, painted landscapes and abstract images in oil, and played the trumpet and what he called a "cowboy harmonica."

"Charles Black was a giant of a man -- intellectually, morally and spiritually," says Anthony Kronman, dean of the Yale Law School. "He was a great inventive scholar, a champion of civil rights, a poet of real distinction and a devoted student, in his last years, of the old Icelandic sagas. No one who ever heard Charles tell a story in his delicious Texas drawl will ever forget the man's wit, passion, erudition and common humanity. Charles was truly beloved by his colleagues on the faculty and by generations of students, who learned much about law and life from a master in both domains."

Born in 1915 in Austin, Texas, the son of a prominent lawyer, Professor Black majored in Greek as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, where he also received a master's degree in English in 1938. He then enrolled at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he did graduate work in Old and Middle English before entering the Yale Law School. After earning his LL.B. in 1943, Mr. Black served in the Army Air Corps as a teacher and then practiced law for a year with the New York firm of David, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland & Kiendl. He joined the faculty at the Columbia University Law School in 1947.

While a teacher of constitutional law at Columbia, Professor Black wrote legal briefs for the successful 1954 Brown v. Board of Education suit. He also was involved in other civil rights cases in the South.

Professor Black came to Yale in 1956 as the Law School's first Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence. He was appointed Sterling Professor of Law in 1975. During his 31-year career at Yale, he authored numerous books, including "The People and the Court," "The Occasions of Justice," "Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law," "The Tides of Power: Conversations on the American Constitution" (with Bob Eckhardt) and "Decision According to Law." He was also a specialist on maritime law; his book "The Law of Admiralty," which he coauthored with Yale Law School classmate Grant Gilmore in 1957, was reissued in 1975 and is still considered a definitive text on the subject. His most recent work, "A New Birth of Freedom: Human Rights, Named and Unnamed," was published in 1999.

Professor Black's "Impeachment: A Handbook" was first published in 1974 during the Watergate scandal and was reissued during the 1999 impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Of the 75-page handbook Time magazine wrote, "The measure of [the] book's achievement is that it tells the reader not what to think but what to think about."

An outspoken critic of capital punishment, Professor Black also authored "Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake." In a 1983 profile in The Texas Humanist, the law professor said, "When you let it be known that you're against racism, you immediately meet the nicest people. The same is true of capital punishment."

At Yale Law School, Professor Black was a popular teacher who was known for keeping the doors to his office open to visitors, even late into the night. In Professor Black's obituary in The New York Times, his former student Akhil Amar, now a Yale law professor, said: "He was my hero. So many of the great moral issues of the 20th century seem clear in retrospect, but were quite controversial at the time. He had the moral courage to go against his race, his class, his social circle."

An avid fan of Louis Armstrong, Professor Black held an "Armstrong Evening" at the Law School from the time of the jazz musician's death in 1971. Many of his colleagues and students relished these annual gatherings, at which the Yale law professor would play old Armstrong 78 r.p.m. records. Professor Black was among the individuals featured in the recent Ken Burns documentary "Jazz: A History of American Music."

Professor Black began writing poetry at the age of 40. His three published volumes are "Telescopes and Islands," "Owls Bay in Babylon" and "The Waking Passenger." In the late 1970s, the eclectic law professor acted in a few professional theatrical performances at Yale, including starring as Cicero in the Yale Repertory Theatre's production of "Julius Caesar."

Professor Black returned to teaching at Columbia Law School following his Yale retirement in 1986, when his wife, Barbara Aronstein Black, became dean of the school. He was adjunct professor there until 1999.

A sought-after lecturer, Black earned a number of honors for his contributions to law and teaching, including the University of Texas at Austin's Distinguished Alumnus Award and an Award of the Society of American Law Teachers. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among other professional organizations. At Yale, he was a member of the Elizabethan Club and was a fellow emeritus of Jonathan Edwards College.

In addition to his wife, Professor Black is survived by two sons, Gavin and David, both of North Brunswick, New Jersey; a daughter, Robin Black of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; and his brother, Thomas B. Black of San Antonio, Texas.

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