�鶹��Ƶ

He was graduated from the Horace Mann School, earned his Phi Beta Kappa key at Yale College (1915), and, following the war, obtained his law degree from Columbia Law School (1920), where he served on the Columbia Law Review.

After a brief association with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, in 1923 he formed Weiss & Wharton with his law school classmate John F. Wharton. Four years later, Louis merged his two-person firm into the practice his father Sam had started and his brother William had continued, thereby creating Cohen, Cole, Weiss & Wharton. Weiss and Wharton were together determined to build a firm of substantial character that aggressively disregarded the then-axiomatic circumstance that Jews and Gentiles neither practiced together nor attracted clients of their respective creeds, an endeavor that ultimately transformed the cultural norms of the New York legal community.

Weiss’s law practice was heavily invested in his relationship with Marshall Field III, scion of the Chicago retailing empire, whose complex personal finances Weiss succeeded in protecting. From these endeavors, Weiss became central to Field Enterprises, the Field Foundation, as well as Field’s collateral interests, which included ownership of the Chicago Sun, for which Weiss devised an antitrust assault on the A.P.’s then-exclusionary policies, which the Supreme Court ultimately outlawed in Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945).

Deeply engaged in mental health care issues, Weiss was general counsel of both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. A director of the American Council on Race Relations, Weiss also served for years on NAACP’s National Legal Committee, succeeding Thurgood Marshall’s mentor, Howard Law School Dean Charles H. Houston, as its chair. With Eleanor Roosevelt, he was a founding director and vice president of the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children during World War II, to relocate refugees from that troubled continent. He was a founding trustee of the National Opinion Research Center, still one of the largest and most respected social research centers in the country. He was a longtime trustee and chairman of the board of the New School of Social Research.

He was the firm’s prime visionary, persuading his partners to hoard profits as capital for use in attracting talent to build a full-service firm to compete with New York’s finest, and then personally recruiting Paul, Rifkind, and Garrison to join his growing firm. He also convinced them to leave the environs of Wall Street, then headquarters of every significant firm in the city, to open offices in midtown Manhattan, today home to most large law firms. 

Weiss never made the move from 61 Broadway to 575 Madison Avenue: On November 13, 1950, at age 56, Louis Weiss died suddenly in his New York City home of a heart attack. In the Chicago Defender, then the Nation’s largest and most influential Black weekly, longtime NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White called Weiss “one of a select group to whom whatever freedom Negro Americans and other minorities have won during recent years was due.”

The son of Jacob Rifkind, a wool merchant, and Celia Bluestone, Rifkind was born on June 5, 1901 in Meretz, Lithuania, then part of Imperial Russia, and immigrated to the United States in 1910, speaking only Yiddish and reading only Hebrew. After attending yeshivas on the lower East Side, he was graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, the City College of New York (1922) with a Phi Beta Kappa key, and Columbia Law School (1925).

In 1927, he became legislative assistant to U.S Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr., in which role he most famously drafted the language - first used in section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and later imported into the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 - that provided the federal guarantee of labor’s right to organize. Rifkind left government for private practice in 1933, but returned in 1941 when he was named to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In 1945, he took a leave from the bench to serve as General Eisenhower’s Special Advisor on Jewish Affairs, touring and counseling on the enormous refugee issues that the century’s most horrendous acts occasioned, a humanitarian service for which President Truman awarded Rifkind the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Upon his return from Europe and to the bench, Rifkind fortified his reputation as perhaps the country’s finest trial judge.

He resigned from the court in 1950 to join what then became Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Over the next four decades, Rifkind acquired an unparalleled reputation for acumen in the courtroom and the boardroom. Among his numerous matters of note were his representation of the proponent in a titanic contest over the will of a J.P. Morgan heiress, the New York Post in a libel action against Walter Winchell, Cities Services in a series of landmark antitrust cases, Jacqueline Kennedy in her dispute over the book Death of a President, Associate Justice William O. Douglas in his impeachment proceedings, New York City in its 1970s fiscal crisis (in which Governor Hugh Carey described Rifkind as “the savior of the city”), Pennzoil in its historic victory over Texaco in the struggle for Getty Oil, and the motion picture companies in the final dismantling of the longstanding Paramount consent decrees.

He served as Special Master for the U.S. Supreme Court in the Colorado River litigation, which still governs water rights in the western United States; as a Deputy Police Commissioner to hear police corruption claims; as Special Master in disputes arising out of the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956; as a member of Governor Rockefeller’s Commission on Governmental Operations of the City of New York; as chair of President Kennedy’s Presidential Railroad Commission; and as co-chair of President Johnson’s Commission on Patents.

In 1986, his prolific writings were collected in a three-volume work, One Man’s Word, later followed by At 90, On the ’90’s: The Journals of Simon H. Rifkind.

Simon Rifkind died of natural causes, age 94, in New York City on November 14, 1995. On his death, one eulogist rightly quoted Learned Hand’s remarks on Rifkind’s departure from the bench: “You are to leave us and we do not wish you to go without trying to carry over to you the sense of our personal loss: the loss of a helpmate whom we are not likely to replace, of a companion who has always been ready and cheerful, of a friend who has seen with our eyes. Your memory will remain with us always.”

He was born to Charles A. and Lenna Lyon Wharton in Newark, New Jersey on July 28, 1894, the youngest child of a hat maker who died when John was 15. He grew up in nearby East Orange, plagued as a child and into early manhood by a mysterious kidney ailment. His escapes were theater and reading. In a “Man in the News” column in The New York Times, Wharton said of his youth that “[w]e used all our spare change to go [to the theater]. We sat first in the balcony, then in the mezzanine and finally worked our way to the orchestra.”

Wharton received his B.A. and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Williams College (Class of 1915), after which began an apprenticeship at McCarter & English in Newark. The demands of his medical treatment lured him across the Hudson, where he attended New York Law School until the outbreak of World War I closed that school. At war’s end, he joined the Columbia Law School Class of 1920, serendipitously meeting Louis S. Weiss, the man he would always describe as “my best friend.”

After a brief association with Rounds, Hatch, Dillingham & Debevoise, he eagerly joined Weiss in 1923 to form Weiss & Wharton, and through Weiss’s college friendship with Dwight Deere Wiman, heir to a farm manufacturing fortune and a budding theatrical producer, Wharton launched a career that would make him, as the book The Playmakers reported, “the dean of the theatrical bar.”

A shrewd business lawyer, Wharton conceived new means for playwrights to protect their interests and for investors to protect theirs - contracts that became standard in the industry and are still known by some as the Wharton Agreements. Together with Robert E. Sherwood, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman and Sidney Howard, he was a founder of the revolutionary Playwrights Producing Company, Inc., which enabled playwrights to produce and thereby control their own works for the theater. He would later nurture the careers of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, among numerous others.

Beyond his work in theater, he mentored Philo Farnsworth’s effort to promote a new technology called television, was present at the birth of Technicolor film and, later, the Cinerama film process, represented David O. Selznick in making Gone with the Wind, was a counselor to the American Ballet Theater, and was entrusted by Cole Porter as trustee of the trust (still a firm client) that licenses the composer’s works.

Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, as a regular contributor to the Saturday Review, he was an essayist on a broad range of social and economic issues, deeply caring about the largest questions of his day, chief among them the consequences of the atom bomb. He wrote five books, including a well-received novel and a book called The Theory and Practice of Earning a Living, which the U.S. Army published in miniature format for GIs returning from World War II, during which he served as a consultant to the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare.

He founded the Theater Development Fund and its famous TKTS booth in Times Square as a way of offering theater to a wider audience. An environmentalist before the word was invented, he promoted campaigns for clean air, clean water, and less noise. 

John Wharton died of emphysema, age 83, in New York City on November 25, 1977. Just years before he died, when New York’s Attorney General threatened to oust the board of the Shubert Organization, a group of Broadway’s leading producers, directors, and union chiefs confronted the AG in person to support the Shuberts, and they chose John Wharton as their sole spokesperson. As one producer said, the AG would not listen to a Broadway crowd, “but he could not ignore John Wharton,” who was “the pope.” The threat was dropped.

A lawyer, author, educator, public servant, federal investigator and administrator, orator, essayist, a civil rights and civil liberties advocate, political reformer, and civic activist, Garrison was born in New York City on November 19, 1897 to Lloyd McKim and Alice Kirkham Garrison. Garrison’s relations were steeped in American history. His great grandfather was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his grandfather, Wendell Phillips Garrison, the longtime literary editor of The Nation, and his father a poet and lawyer who died prematurely when Lloyd was 3. (Garrison himself married Ellen Jay, a direct descendant of the country’s first Chief Justice John Jay and who, in her mature years, would gain unlikely fame playing Mia Farrow’s elder self in Woody Allen’s film Zelig.)

Garrison was educated at the St. Paul’s School, and took his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1919, his study interrupted by service in the first Navy contingent to reach France in World War I. Upon receipt of his law degree from Harvard Law in 1922, he joined Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland, where he first became expert in bankruptcy law. In 1926 Garrison and a Root, Clark colleague formed a small firm of their own called Parker & Garrison, but within three years President Hoover named Garrison Special Assistant to the Attorney General to investigate bankruptcy fraud, which ultimately resulted in changes in the Bankruptcy Laws that Garrison drafted.

Not long thereafter, still in his thirties, he became Dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School and a leader in the legal realism movement, on which he published a treatise. Presidential appointments frequently interrupted his academic life, most significantly as the first chair of the National Labor Relations Board. With the outset of World War II, he became first general counsel and then chair of the National War Labor Board.

In May 1946, Garrison accepted Louis Weiss’s invitation to join Randolph Paul in the renamed Paul, Weiss, Wharton & Garrison. Immediately thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court named him Special Master in a major controversy over railroad rates.

A jack of all trades and a master of them all, Garrison was equally at home trying cases and handling complex commercial transactions and securities offerings. At the height of the McCarthy hysteria, he represented J. Robert Oppenheimer in the kangaroo court that stripped the father of the atomic bomb of security clearance owing to the professor’s alleged opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. He later represented Arthur Miller in the playwright’s appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, ultimately succeeding in obtaining a reversal of a contempt of Congress charge following Miller’s refusal to name names. His close friendship with Adlai E. Stevenson is the reason the latter joined the firm after his second presidential campaign.

Beginning in the later 1950’s, Garrison led the charge to stop Con Edison from constructing a hydroelectric power generating station on the top of Storm King Mountain, a famous Hudson Valley landmark, obtaining an injunction that was a seminal moment in environmental law.

Garrison was a long-time member and eventually chair of the National Urban League, an activist in the Reform movement in the New York State Democratic Party, a leader of the United Negro College Fund, and the calming chair of the New York City Board of Education during the contentious and racially-charged 1960s. He was member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for a quarter century, a trustee of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, and served on the boards of Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence College and Howard University.

Upon his retirement from active practice in 1974, he became the non-executive chair of the firm, his impeccable manners, humble personal style, and incapacity to utter an unkind word, immeasurably contributing to the congeniality and friendship for which the firm’s partners were famous.

Lloyd Garrison died at his Manhattan home of natural causes, age 93, on October 1, 1991. One memoirist wrote of Garrison that, “while he walked among giants, witnessed so much history, and made such an enduring imprint on the law and his times, the memories his colleagues cherish the most are the sweetness of his faint blush at the mildly ribald anecdote, the acuity of a mind that could quote Keats at just the right moment, the ferocity of a 70-year-old man sliding feet first into third base at a firm picnic outing, and the grace of this gentle man waltzing at 85 in a twirl out of an Edith Wharton novel.”