John Kirby

John Joseph Kirby Jr. (October 22, 1939 – October 2, 2019) was an American attorney. He was most notable for his successful defense for Nintendo against Universal Studios over the copyrightability of the character of Donkey Kong in 1984, from which Nintendo subsequently named the character Kirby to honor him. Early life and education Kirby was born in Falls Church, Virginia, on October 22, 1939, to John Joseph Kirby, a lawyer with the federal government for over 40 years, and Rose L. Mangan Kirby, a homemaker. He had two brothers, Peter Kirby and Michael Kirby, and two sisters, Lisa Greissing and Cecelia Wrasse. Kirby graduated from Fordham University in 1961, where he served as Student Body President and was also a Rhodes scholar, earning both a Bachelors and a Masters degree from Merton College at Oxford University. He also was a Fordham trustee and a trustee fellow. He subsequently earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1966. Career During his younger days, Kirby worked at the United States Department of Justice as the special assistant to the head of the Civil Rights Division, John Doar, during the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. At the Department of Justice, where he first worked as a summer intern, he gathered voting records throughout the South that demonstrated evidence of widespread discrimination against African-Americans. His documentation of methods such as literacy tests specifically designed to exclude African-Americans from voting helped form the basis of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While at the Civil Rights Division, he also found himself personally escorting African-American children into segregated schools, surrounded by federal marshals. Later, he was appointed Deputy Director to the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, founded in the aftermath of the killings of four students at Kent State University.