Erwin Griswold

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Erwin Griswold (1904-1994) was a prominent American lawyer. He served as Solicitor General of the United States (1967-1973) under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. He also served as Dean of Harvard Law School for 21 years. During a career that spanned more than six decades, he served as member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and as President of the American Bar Foundation.

Born Erwin Nathaniel Griswold in East Cleveland, Ohio, to a middle-class family, he attended Oberlin College in his early years, obtaining an A.B. in mathematics and an M.A. in political science. From 1925 to 1928, he studied law at Harvard, culminating in an LL.B. and an S.J.D. degree in 1929.

After working in his father's law firm in Cleveland for six weeks, Griswold moved to Washington D.C. in 1929, where he worked as an assistant to Solicitor General Charles Evans Hughes Jr., son of Charles Evans Hughes Sr., who would become Chief Justice of the United States. In 1934, Griswold returned to Harvard Law School as an assistant professor of law, and was promoted to full professorship within a year.

During World War II, Griswold served on the Alien Enemy Board in Boston, Massachusetts. He was involved in decisions concerning the internment of Japanese, German and Italian citizens; this period of his life is not documented in his official biography.

Griswold assumed the deanship of Harvard Law School in 1946. His highly successful tenure as dean was marked by the enlargement of the school's curriculum to include such specialized topics as labor relations, family law, and copyright; the admission of women (1949); the appointment of many new faculty, among them Derek Bok, Kingman Brewster, Archibald Cox, and Alan Dershowitz; and the expansion of the Law School's physical plant, library holdings, and financial resources.

Upon his retirement as Dean and Langedell Professor of Law in 1967, Griswold was appointed Solicitor General of the United States by President Lyndon B. Johnson on the same day. Johnson was a Democrat, Griswold was a moderate Republican, and the bipartisan appointment was widely praised. Griswold served under both President Johnson and his successor, the more conservative Richard M. Nixon.

In 1973, Griswold resigned as Solicitor General, and joined the international law firm of Jones Day Reavis & Pogue, serving as a mentor to many of the young lawyers of the firm. He continued to practice and argued many cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Griswold, an appellate advocate par excellence, argued more cases than any other lawyer in twentieth century before the U.S. Supreme Court, and was suggested several times as a possible appointee to the Court. He also served as a trustee of his undergraduate alma mater, Oberlin College. Griswold was also active in the Supreme Court Historical Society, serving as Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the time of his death in 1994.

As Solicitor General, Griswold unsuccessfully argued against the publication of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times, because such publication would cause a "grave and immediate danger to the security of the United States." Years later, he reversed his position in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, writing, "I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication" of the Pentagon Papers. He suggested that government demands for secrecy be treated with some skepticism by the public.

See also

• Harvard Law School

Further reading

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• http://oasis.harvard.edu/html/law00047frames.html - Papers at Harvard Law School
• http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/supreme.html - Pentagon Papers Supreme Court case
• Ould Fields, New Corne: The Personal Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Lawyer, ISBN 0314929517