Civil Liberties Attorney. He was the son of Jewish immigrants and he connected his father's union activities with his own respect for working people and his status as an oppressed minority as an impetus for furthering equal rights. He obtained his bachelor’s degree at City College of New York, and went on to law school at Georgetown University. In the 1960s he helped found the Virginia unit of the American Civil Liberties Union and volunteered his time there. Still young and only practicing law for a few years, on April 10, 1967, he argued for the ACLU on behalf of the petitioners Richard and Mildred Loving in the case of Loving v. Virginia before the Supreme Court of the United States. His co-counsel was Philip Hirschkop, who had also recently completed law school at Georgetown. On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court rendered its unanimous decision overturning a Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the state to create and enforce racial marriage laws known as anti-miscegenation laws. The decision validated that interracial marriage bans were unconstitutional and their existence in some states and not others denied the couple equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment. Most significantly, it reversed the right of states to create laws that banned interracial marriage or enforce such laws where they existed. The ruling voided the existing interracial marriage laws of 15 mostly Southern states, including all the states of the former Confederacy. Cohen has been portrayed as a character in multiple dramatizations of the Loving case. From 1980 to 1996, he served as a representative to the Virginia House of Delegates. In 2007, he co-authored a blog entry for the Huffington Post about the legal standing of same sex marriage.