Early Life and Law Career
Cox was the son of Archibald and Frances Perkins Cox. His mother was the sister of Maxwell Perkins, an editor at the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. A native of Plainfield, New Jersey, Cox attended the Wardlaw School, and St. Paul's School. He graduated from Harvard College in 1934 and from Harvard Law School in 1937 where he was a member of Phi Delta Phi legal fraternity. He was a clerk for U.S. Judge Learned Hand of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After his clerkship, he joined the Boston law firm of Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge and Rugg, now known as Ropes & Gray. During World War II, he was appointed to the National Defense Board, and then to the Office of the Solicitor General.
After the end of World War II, Cox joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he taught courses in torts and in administrative, constitutional, and labor law. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. During the 1950s, he became an informal adviser and speech-writer for John F. Kennedy, who was then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Cox assisted Kennedy's campaign for President in 1960. In 1961, Cox joined the Kennedy administration as solicitor general. At a time when civil rights protesters were routinely chased with dogs and clubbed, he often appeared before the Supreme Court in support of their cause. Among the cases he was involved with were Baker v. Carr, which set the constitutional standards for reapportionment; Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, which set a precedent by recognizing the Constitution's authorization for federal laws requiring desegregation of public accommodations for African-Americans; and South Carolina v. Katzenbach, which upheld the Voting Rights Act. In 1965, he returned to Harvard's law school. He remained a highly sought-after negotiator and mediator. He was chosen by the New York City school system to help settle a teacher strike in 1967, and by Columbia University to investigate riots on its campus in 1968. He served as a special investigator for the Massachusetts state legislature in 1972.
Read more about this topic: Archibald Cox
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, law and/or career:
“I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except ones own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brimobjects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)
“Well, I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. And thats what I try to do, is sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.”
—Irving Ravetch (b. 1920)
“John Browns career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)