Erwin Nathaniel Griswold (July 14, 1904 – November 19, 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.
He was born to parents James Harlen and Hope (Erwin) in East Cleveland, Ohio. Griswold graduated from Oberlin College in 1925. In 1928, Griswold graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School. Throughout his career he received numerous honorary degrees from many prestigious universities, including Columbia University, Northwestern University, Brown University, and the University of Sydney. After being admitted to the Ohio bar in 1929, Griswold was a partner in the Cleveland law firm Griswold, Green, Palmer & Hadden, but he soon joined the U.S. Office of the Solicitor General as a staff attorney and served as a special assistant to the attorney general from 1929-1934. He became an expert at arguing tax cases before the Supreme Court, and was considered one of the great legal scholars in the tax field.
Griswold joined the Harvard faculty in 1934, first as an associate legal professor, and then as a full professor from 1935-1946. Known by his Harvard peers for an extremely keen intellect, Griswold was made dean of Harvard Law School from 1946-1967. As a dominant figure in American legal education, he doubled the size of the faculty and oversaw the enrollments of the first female students in 1950. In 1979, as an honorary gesture for his impact on the Harvard community, Harvard dedicated Griswold Hall, housing the dean's office, faculty offices, and a classroom.
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. Griswold was a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1961-1967. In October 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Griswold to serve as United States Solicitor General, where he advocated in support of the Great Society legislation. He stayed on board as solicitor general into President Richard Nixon's presidency. In one of the more controversial cases of the 1970s, Griswold advocated the government's position that the courts should bar newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers.
After his service as solicitor general, Griswold returned to private law practice in 1973 with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C. He continued to argue cases before the Supreme Court until 1994. From 1983-1994, he served the U.S. government as a liaison between U.S. and Soviet lawyers in the Lawyers Alliance Nuclear Arms Control. Griswold also served as the president of the Association of American Law Schools from 1957 to 1958, and the American Bar Foundation from 1971-1974. In 1978, the American Bar Association awarded Griswold the gold medal for his outstanding contributions and service to the legal community.
Griswold wrote several books including Spendthrift Trusts (1936), Cases on Federal Taxation (1940), Cases on Conflict Laws (1942), and arguably his most popular, The Fifth Amendment Today, Law and Lawyers in the United States (1992). Erwin Griswold died on November 19, 1994, in Boston, at the age of 90. He was survived by his wife of 62 years, Harriet Allena Ford, two children, as well as five grandchildren. A court battle still rages on concerning the alleged sexual abuse and torture of his two children, and some of his grandchildren. Video tapes and a "dungeon" were found in his basement, along with childrens' clothing and pornographic video tapes featuring children under the age of 10.
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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 and cannot be verified.
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.
This article incorporates facts obtained from the public domain Office of the Solicitor General.

See also

Harvard Law School