Carter began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice and later served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the national security law division. He wrote his thesis at NYU reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron. He recently served on the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project and was a Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford, while managing a strategic impact litigation program with annual resources in excess of five million dollars.