Lewis M. Steel (born April 25, 1937) is a civil rights attorney and author who was co-lead counsel of the legal team that freed the boxer Rubin Carter and John Artis after they were wrongly convicted of murder. While working for the NAACP during the 1960s, he worked to desegregate public schools in the North. In 1971 he joined other civil rights lawyers, including William Kunstler, and New York Times columnist Tom Wicker to try to negotiate a settlement of the Attica Prison riot. He was the lead attorney in Avagliano v. Sumitomo Shoji America, 457 U.S. 176 (1982) which established that American subsidiaries of foreign corporations must obey American civil rights laws. He continues working as a civil rights attorney at the New York law firm Outten & Golden LLP, with a special focus on lawsuits that address barriers that make it difficult for formerly incarcerated people to secure employment. Early life and education Steel was born and raised in New York City. His paternal grandmother, Bessie Levy Warner, was a daughter of Moe Levy, who owned an eponymous chain of successful clothing stores. After her first husband died, she married the film executive Albert Warner, who was one of the Warner Brothers. Steel attended Culver Military Academy, Harvard College - where he co-founded the Harvard Opera Guild and produced operas with his lifelong friend, the critic Peter G. Davis - and New York Law School, where he was editor in chief of the law review. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People After law school Steel volunteered to work for the NAACP legal staff and then was hired by NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter, who won 21 race related cases in the U.S. Supreme Court including Brown v. Board of Education (1954). While Brown repudiated the racial doctrine of separate but equal established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the South and the North resisted integration and the courts required civil rights attorneys to demonstrate that the segregation in place was intentional. In his trials, Steel helped develop Carter’s legal theory that used psychological evidence to show that school segregation, whether intentional or not, severely damaged Black children, in cases in Cincinnati, Ohio and Kokomo, Indiana. Steel also used that theory and type of evidence in winning a case against Governor James A. Rhodes of Ohio that required public projects using union construction workers to include blacks.