erwin griswold

Erwin Griswold (1904-1994) was 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 his career that spanned over 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 then Solicitor General Charles Evans Hughes Jr., who was later appointed Chief Justice of the United States. In 1934, he returned to his alma mater, Harvard, as an assistant professor of law, and was promoted to full professorship within a year. Griswold assumed the Deanship of Harvard Law School in 1946. His 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, Professor Griswold was appointed Solicitor General of the United States by President Lyndon B. Johnson on the same day. He served dutifully under President Johnson and his successor, the more conservative President Nixon. In 1973, Griswold resigned his office, and joined the international law firm of Jones Day, serving as a senior mentor to some of the young emerging lawyers of that firm. He continued to practice and argued many cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Professor Griswold, the advocate par excellence of twentieth century America, argued more cases than any other lawyer in twentieth century before the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, as Solicitor General, Griswold 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 of America." Years later, he reversed his position in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, stating, "I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication."

Erwin Griswold

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