ROBERT "Bob" SPEARMAN

SPEARMAN ROBERT SPEARMAN "Bob" Bob Spearman, an honored North Carolina trial lawyer, died on December 3, 2017. The causes were dementia and Parkinson's disease. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Patricia Hinds Spearman; daughters Madolyn Marschall (Mark Salditch) of Baltimore and Dorothy Marschall of Corte Madera, California; grandchildren Zoe Salditch, Leah Salditch, Ellis Hurtado and Weston Hurtado; and sister Mary Lindsay Spearman of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Robert Worthington Spearman was born on January 24, 1943, the son of Walter S. and Mary E. Dale Spearman. During his formative years in Chapel Hill, where his father was a beloved journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, he attended the public schools, became an Eagle Scout, and developed his lifelong love for birds and Carolina basketball. His father, an ardent Democrat, sent him to Groton for high school because President Franklin Roosevelt had gone there. He was co-captain of the Groton basketball team, graduated first in his class, and was awarded a Morehead Scholarship to UNC, where he compiled a perfect 4.0 academic average and became the first (and only) student to be elected president of both the student body and Phi Beta Kappa. He was a member of Chi Psi and the Order of the Golden Fleece, UNC's highest honorary society. Working alongside UNC President William Friday and other university officials, he galvanized student opposition to North Carolina's infamous "Speaker Ban" law, which was the subject of his senior honorsthesis. In 1965 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and played basketball. One of his Rhodes Scholar teammates was Princeton All-America and future U.S. Senator Bill Bradley. "The implicit understanding," he said, "was that if Bradley was open and I took a shot instead of passing to him, I would come out of the game." After graduating from the Yale Law School in 1970, Bob served as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. At the time neither knew that it would be Justice Black's last term on the Court, or that Bob would help him draft his last and most famous opinion, in the "Pentagon Papers" case. Returning to North Carolina in 1971, he entered private law practice in Raleigh. He practiced with Sanford, Cannon, Adams & McCullough and its successor firms for his entire career, retiring on January 1, 2010 from Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein. Although he handled a wide array of antitrust cases and other complex commercial and business litigation in both state and federal court, Bob was best known for his creative and energetic representation of public school students from poor and rural counties in the landmark case known as Leandro v. State of North Carolina. The Leandro case, which was filed in 1994 and is still pending, resulted in two major State Supreme Court opinions. The first ruled that North Carolina schoolchildren have a judicially enforceable constitutional right to a sound and basic education. The second affirmed a series of later superior court decisions after trials, and held the State had wrongfully denied this right to many State schoolchildren. Bob's Parker Poe colleagues, for whom he was a mentor and role model, are carrying on his fight. Bob was a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a director of the American Judicature Society. He served as a faculty member for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy, taught trial practice at the UNC School of Law, and was a frequent lecturer at judge's conferences and lawyer seminars. He also served as chair of the Wake County Democratic Party from 1979 to 1981, and as chair of the State Board of Elections from 1981 until 1985. He was a founder and chair of the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research. A celebration of Bob's life will be held at a later date. His family suggests that memorial contributions be made to UNC's Carolina Covenant Scholarships General Fund, P.O. Box 1080, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-1080.A celebration of Bob's life will be held at a later date. His family suggests that memorial contributions be made to UNC's Carolina Covenant Scholarships General Fund, P.O. Box 1080, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-1080.