Arnold, Thurman W. (1891–1969)

Born in Laramie, Wyoming, Thurman Wesley Arnold was educated at Princeton University and the Harvard Law School. Following World War I, during which Arnold served in France, he returned to Laramie, where he served in the Wyoming legislature and as Mayor of Laramie.

Arnold's academic career began when Roscoe Pound recommended Arnold for Dean of West Virginia's law school in 1927. Arnold's record there earned him the notice of Yale Law School Dean Charles Clark, who lured Arnold to Yale in 1930. At the time, Yale was the epicenter of American legal realism, and Arnold flourished, writing his best-known books, Symbols of Government and The Folklore of Capitalism.

Following Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 as U.S. president, Arnold divided his time between government and teaching, finally leaving Yale for Washington permanently in 1938. Arnold served in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; as aide to the governor general of the Philippines; as a trial examiner for the Securities and Exchange Commission; in the Department of Justice's tax division; and finally as the head of the Department's antitrust division. During his tenure at the latter, Arnold is credited with single-handedly reviving antitrust as a means of regulating industry.

In 1943, Roosevelt nominated Arnold for a seat on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Arnold soon tired of being a judge, resigning in 1945. He then founded the law firm of Arnold, Fortas, and Porter (now Arnold & Porter) with friends Abe Fortas (1910–1982) and Paul Porter (1908–2002). Though the firm would serve as the model for the so-called Washington law firm of the future, it was heavily involved in civil liberties cases during the 1950s and 1960s, most involving government employees facing loyalty investigations. One of the most famous of these involved Owen Lattimore (1900–1989), an important American scholar of central Asia, whom Senator Joseph McCarthy accused in 1950 of harboring communist sympathies and alleged to have been [Page 96]the architect of a Far East policy that “lost” China to the communists. Arnold successfully defended Lattimore against a perjury charge resulting from testimony that Lattimore had given to Congress.

Though a civil libertarian, Arnold later privately resigned from the American Civil Liberties Union over its advocacy, as Arnold saw it, of civil disobedience. Late in life, Arnold publicly defended both American policy in Vietnam and his old friend and former law partner Abe Fortas, who was forced to resign from the U.S. Supreme Court amid allegations of financial impropriety. Arnold died in 1969, remembered for his wit, his disdain for pomposity, and a personality described as equal parts “Voltaire and the cowboy.”