Erwin Griswold

Erwin Nathaniel Griswold (July 14, 1904 – November 19, 1994) was an American appellate attorney and legal scholar who argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Griswold graduated from Oberlin College in 1925 with an A.B. in mathematics and an M.A. in political science.

He attended Harvard Law School from 1925 to 1929, earning an LL.B. summa cum laude in 1928 and an S.J.D. in 1929.

Griswold compiled The Bluebook, a uniform system of legal citation used by law professionals, in 1926 while a student at Harvard Law School.

In 1929, Griswold was admitted to the Ohio bar and spent six weeks working as a partner in his father's Cleveland law firm of Griswold, Green, Palmer & Hadden.

He subsequently joined the U.S. Office of the Solicitor General as a staff attorney and served as a special assistant to the attorney general from 1929 to 1934.

There he worked under Solicitor General Charles Evans Hughes Jr., son of the future Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes Sr. He became an expert at arguing tax cases before the Supreme Court, and is considered one of the great scholars in tax law.

Griswold joined the Harvard faculty in 1934, first as an associate legal professor, and then as a full professor from 1935 to 1946.

On December 11, 1934, the Harvard Law Review published an article by Griswold titled "Government in Ignorance of the Law – A Plea for Better Publication of Executive Legislation".

The arguments Griswold made for orderly publication of the official actions of the Executive Branch were underlined when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan and forced the hand of the committee studying the issue for President Roosevelt.

Congress passed legislation to create the Federal Register, and the president signed it into law (Pub. L. 74-220, July 26, 1935).

As dean, Griswold enlarged the school's curriculum to include such specialized topics as labor relations, family law, and copyright law.

In addition, he expanded the school's physical plant, library holdings, and financial resources.

During his academic career, Griswold was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1941 and the American Philosophical Society in 1955.

Known for a very keen intellect, Griswold was made dean of Harvard Law School from 1946 and served in that capacity until 1967.

One of the dominant figures in American legal education, he doubled the size of the faculty, bringing in legal scholars Derek Bok (who succeeded him as dean, and later became president of Harvard University), Kingman Brewster (later president of Yale University), and Alan Dershowitz.

In 1946, just after Griswold was made dean, Soia Mentschikoff was appointed visiting professor, the first woman faculty member in the history of Harvard Law School.

Finally, he began the process of convincing the Harvard Corporation to allow the enrollment of female students in 1948, and oversaw it beginning in Autumn of 1950.

The Law School was the third graduate school at Harvard to admit women after the Graduate School of Education and the Medical School.

In the 1950s, Griswold served as an expert witness for Thurgood Marshall, who was then the legal director of the NAACP, in several cases that the association brought to lay the foundation for the Supreme Court's desegregation order in Brown v. Board of Education.

Earlier in the 1950s Griswold denounced Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in his book The Fifth Amendment Today, which examined the constitutional protection against self-incrimination.

A 1960 profile of Mr. Griswold in The New York Times said that "when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was in full cry against the use of the Fifth Amendment by witnesses accused of Communist ties, one of the most forceful voices in defense of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination was raised by Dean Erwin Nathaniel Griswold of the Harvard Law School."

Griswold was a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1961 to 1967 having been appointed by John F. Kennedy.

On May 8, 1963, in the midst of police violence and massive arrests of schoolchildren in Birmingham, Alabama, Kennedy held a press conference in which he answered a reporter's question about the matter of improving U.S. race relations, and a suggestion there was need for a fireside chat on civil rights, with the claim that the federal government had done all it legally could do about the issue.

Griswold quickly responded publicly that this was untrue; "It seems clear to me that he hasn't even started to use the powers that are available to him."

An angry Kennedy privately fumed, "That son-of-a-bitch! Let him try."

On June 11, after another crisis—Governor George Wallace blocking the door to the University of Alabama—Kennedy finally gave his Report to the American People on Civil Rights.

Griswold served as Solicitor General of the United States (1967–1973) under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

He also served as the dean of Harvard Law School for 21 years.

Several times he was considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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.

Griswold was born in East Cleveland, Ohio, to Hope (Erwin) and James Harlen Griswold.

On the same day that Griswold retired as dean and Langdell Professor of Law in 1967, President Johnson appointed him United States Solicitor General.

Johnson was a Democrat and Griswold a moderate Republican, but the bipartisan appointment was widely praised.

Harriet S. Shapiro became the first woman attorney in the Solicitor General's office when Griswold hired her in 1972.

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."

As Solicitor General, Griswold advocated in support of Great Society legislation, and he continued on in the position under President Nixon until 1973.

It did so twenty-seven years before Harvard College fully admitted women as undergraduates in 1977.

At Harvard, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was challenged, along with all the other pioneer female Harvard Law School students at the time, as to why she was taking up a man's seat by Dean Griswold.

In a 1992 interview, he recalled that at the time, over one-third of the faculty were against the admission of women.