Thurman Arnold

Thurman Arnold (1891-1969) was a major iconoclast of American law and a great liberal of the 20th century. Born in Laramie, Wyoming, Arnold’s western upbringing influenced his distinctive views about law and power. After studying at Princeton and Harvard Law School, Arnold practiced law in Chicago, served in World War I, and eventually returned to Laramie, where he was a prominent attorney, mayor, and state legislator in the 1920s. As the rise of national corporations began to destroy the local businesses that were the core of his legal practice, Arnold turned from the courtroom to the academics, most notably at Yale Law School, where he became one of the leading spokesmen for the legal realism movement. Arnold’s work attracted the attention of Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him to head the Antitrust Division during the New Deal. He went on to establish Arnold, Fortas & Porter, which became the epitome of the modern Washington, DC law firm. Arnold and his partners took on the defense of hundreds of individuals accused of Communist sympathies from the government during the darkest days of the McCarthy era. Arnold and his partners argued several of these cases all the way to the Supreme Court at a time when they were trying to build a paying practice of business clients, many of whom objected quite strongly to the defense of alleged subversives.

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