American Lawyer: Twelve Attorneys Who Have Transformed the United States
Justin Miller Award Recipient
Josh Britt
Justin Miller Award Category
Leadership
Justin Miller Award Date
2024
Description
Political polarization has always threatened a fracturing of the union in the vast and varied United States: from Abraham Lincoln rising from the prairies in his fight for the Emancipation Proclamation (ending slavery) to Atticus Finch firing up the public imagination (through a depiction of the universal right to a fair trial) to Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of Education (for equality in civil rights) to Johnnie Cochran and Joe Jamail, men of very different backgrounds righting wrongs in the criminal justice and tort system. There are lawyers profiled in these pages who have tried to heal the fracturing of the union. Robert Jackson in his dissent in Korematsu v. United States, before his pioneering work as Chief Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial, expressed eloquent concern about the “protection of the outsider.” David McCraw, in his role as litigation counsel at one of the nation’s two great newspapers, brought freedom of information cases that fought populism and nationalistic complicities at the highest reaches of the government. Even corporate lawyer Joseph Flom fought jingoistic tendencies in the rarefied atmosphere of mergers and acquisitions. He primarily built his formidable reputation in the takeover business, encouraged the flow of capital (even where it meant the hollowing out of corporate America), and went to battle for corporate raiders, wherever they came from. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Larry Sonsini was quietly building a practice in early stage venture capital, which would support companies that transformed America and our world.
There were two extraordinary women: first, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, who did everything in her power to breach the gap between men and women in American society and whose body of work was American law writ large. Second, there was Catharine Alice MacKinnon who tried to cleanse the body politic with sexual harassment laws, pornography ordinances, and prosecuting the first international tort case that found rape to be genocide. There are yet others, hidden under the fabric of history: Gardiner Greene Hubbard, an extraordinary lawyer, who supported his son-in-law Alexander Graham Bell, whose rise from obscure beginnings, teaching the deaf, inventing the telephone, creating a corporate empire (Ma Bell), is by any measure a great North American story. There was also Russell Baker, who learned Spanish as a young boy, worked as a boxer to put himself through school, expanded his fledgling, pugilistic firm internationally and created one of the world’s largest law firms. Even as the union was threatened at home, America always benefited from welcoming the outsider: globalism not parochialism, diversity not tribalism, an international outlook and not a turning inward.
Publisher
Twelve Tables Press
Publication Date
2022
ISBN
9781946074355