Melvin Lawrence Wulf was born on Nov. 1, 1927, in Brooklyn and moved with his family to Troy, N.Y., near Albany, when he was 8. His father, Jack, owned a company that made men’s suits and coats. His mother, Vivian (Hurwitz) Wulf, was a homemaker.
Mr. Wulf, intending to enter the family business, attended the Lowell Textile Institute in Massachusetts for three years. But in 1950 he transferred to Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in general studies in 1952.
After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1955, he spent two years as a lawyer in the Navy. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 1958 as assistant legal director and rose to legal director four years later.
In one of Mr. Wulf’s cases, Healy v. James, he argued before the Supreme Court that Central Connecticut State College (now University), in New Britain, had infringed on students’ First Amendment rights by refusing to let them form a local chapter of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. The school said it feared disruption from the group. In 1972, the court unanimously affirmed the students’ right to form the chapter.
In another case, Bigelow v. Virginia in 1975, the court ruled, 7-2, on behalf of the managing editor of a Virginia newspaper, finding that his constitutional rights had been violated when he was convicted of printing an advertisement for legal out‐of‐state abortion services at a clinic in New York.
After leaving the A.C.L.U., Mr. Wulf formed a law firm with Mr. Levine and Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general. (Ms. Peratis joined them several months later.) The firm won a Supreme Court case challenging book-banning by a school district on Long Island and successfully defended two authors against libel charges brought by the Church of Scientology. But with expenses high and other factors, the firm dissolved after five years.