Legal News

Griffin Bell, Attorney General in Carter Administration, Passes Away at 90

By Dan Slater

This morning, as President-elect Obama was announcing key DOJ picks, Griffin Boyette Bell, who served as Jimmy Carter’s first attorney general, from January 1977 to August 1979, passed away. Bell — who’d reportedly been suffering from kidney disease, pancreatic cancer and pneumonia — was 90.

“He was thinking outside the box before there was a box,” Bob Steed, a King & Spalding partner, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC notes that Bell (Georgia Southwestern College, Mercer U. School of Law) spent over six decades at the firm and almost 15 years on the federal bench. Click here for the NYT’s obit.

As AG, Bell reportedly helped rehabilitate the reputation of the Justice Department and push through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a law increasing judicial oversight of government wiretapping. (We wrote quite a bit about FISA in the first half of ’08.)

As a practicing lawyer, according to the AJC:

[h]is specialty lay in conducting internal, page-turning investigations for big companies in trouble: E.F. Hutton, after its financial scandal; Exxon, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska; Dow Corning, after silicone breast implants were linked to health risks.

In 2002, Bell gave this commencement speech at his alma mater, Mercer University’s law school. He said:

In 1835, a young Frenchman by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville came to this country to study our prison system. He stayed for two years and ended up writing Democracy in America, an epic study of our democratic system. He reached many conclusions, and two apply to you.

First, he said that almost every problem that arises in a democracy will eventually be resolved in the court system. This was true then and it is true now.

Second, he said that there was no aristocracy in America, but that the nearest approach to aristocracy was in the lawyer class. His thought was that lawyers occupy an unusual and favored position in our system.

So now that you are about to become aristocrats, I want to give you a short lecture on behavior. We have an ample supply of lawyers in our country, and some of the lawyers overlook the obligation to serve others. They also distort the privilege of practicing law by converting it into a mere occupation. I was taught in law school that a lawyer had ethical obligations well above the morals of the marketplace. . .

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 05, 2009 (boomark / email).