Background

Alexander Bickel was born on December 17, 1924, in Bucharest, Rumania, the son of Solomon Bickel, a writer, and Yetta Schafer.

Education

In 1947 Bickel graduated from City College of New York, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and two years later earned an LL. B. , summa cum laude, at Harvard Law School.

Career

Bickel served in a variety of judicial clerkships and public policy roles, beginning in 1949-1950 as law clerk to Chief Judge Calvert Magruder on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, Massachussets. In 1950 he became a law officer in the U. S. State Department and in 1952 began a one-year term as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Bickel returned to the State Department in 1953 as a special assistant to the director of the policy planning staff. The next year he returned to Harvard University as a research associate in the law school and began work on his first book, The Unpublished Opinions of Mr. Justice Brandeis, which was published in 1957.

In 1956 he began a distinguished career as a professor of law at Yale University. Described by his students as "mesmeric, " "bright, witty, and off-putting, all at the same time, " Bickel was as much admired for his energetic and urbane lecturing style as he was for the intellectual subtlety of his case analysis. By 1960 he was a full professor. Six years later he was named Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History. From 1971 to 1974 he was William C. DeVane Professor and, in 1974, became Sterling Professor of Law. He delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes lectures at Harvard in 1969 and spent the next academic year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences in California.

A constitutional conservative, Bickel rejected absolutist doctrines as dangerously confining and as conducive to tyranny. In his years at Yale, he moved steadily toward a rejection of judicial activism in establishing social policy on the ground that any such exercise of judicial power was both unworkable and intolerable. His scholarly writing was directed toward both a historical analysis of the Supreme Court and an assessment of its present-day role in American life. His books include The Least Dangerous Branch (1962), Politics and the Warren Court (1965), and Reform and Continuity (1971). He died before completing a two-volume history of the Courtin the early twentieth century. The Morality of Consent, seen by some critics as a preliminary summary of his legal philosophy, was published posthumously in 1975.

Bickel was a contributing editor of The New Republic from 1957 until his death, and a commentator for magazines such as Commentary. In 1961 he bitterly attacked John F. Kennedy's appointment of Robert F. Kennedy to the post of attorney general, declaring that RFK was not fit for the office. In 1968, however, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he traveled across the country speaking in behalf of RFK's insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In a wry aside to a reporter who had called attention to his earlier statement, Bickel said he was considering publishing a list of good presidents who were "not fit to be Attorney General. "

As a public man and policymaker, appearing on television broadcasts, at national gatherings, and in congressional hearings in the 1960's, he was a fervent supporter of civil rights activism and a forceful advocate of integration in education, housing, recreation, and employment. A decade later Bickel concluded that programs leading to integration and assimilation were not working, and were perhaps unlikely to work in the near future. In the Holmes lectures at Harvard in 1969, later expanded and published as The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress, he argued that the key to improving the condition of blacks and other minorities in the United States was not to be found in court doctrines or intervention by the federal government. Relief, he said, lay in local autonomy, in community participation, and in quality education controlled by parents, even if that education was delivered in segregated schools or the political involvement of minorities was achieved through weighted voting in violation of the established principle of one person, one vote.

Bickel's role as a lawyer (as distinct from his academic role as an authority on the Constitution) was equally complex because he often took unexpected positions in the cases he helped to litigate as lead lawyer or consultant. In his best-known court appearance, he successfully defended the New York Times against the Nixon White House in the Pentagon Papers case of 1971, in which the administration had sought, through prior restraint, to prevent publication of documents and memos relating to the government's policies in Vietnam on the ground that publication threatened national security. To the dismay of some civil libertarians, Bickel ignored the doctrine that the First Amendment provided absolute freedom of the press and pursued instead the more pragmatic argument that publication of the papers did not represent a clear and present danger to the nation. He told the Supreme Court that if the president should possess the inherent power to exercise prior restraint, he could do so only when there was a "direct, immediate, and visible" result that threatened the nation's very existence. No such result, he said, would flow from printing the Pentagon Papers as the New York Times proposed to do. The Court agreed by a vote of six to three. Bickel succumbed to cancer in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of forty-nine.

Achievements

• Alexander Bickel was well established as one of the preeminent legal scholars of his generation. He was an expert on the United States Constitution and one of the most influential constitutional commentators. Bickel was also famous through his writings which addressed such varied topics as citizenship, civil disobedience, freedom of speech, moral authority and intellectual thought. His best works were The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress (1970) and The Morality of Consent (1975).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress

    ( Timeless questions about the role of the Supreme Court ...)

  • Politics and the Warren Court

    (American democracy is a government of men as well as laws...)

  • The Morality of Consent

    ( “This short but provocative volume… is a fitting testim...)

  • The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court At The Bar Of Politics

    (Book by Bickel, Alexander Mordecai)

  • The Unpublished Opinions of Mr. Justice Brandeis

Politics

Bickel most often reflected a liberal Democratic viewpoint, but he was far from doctrinaire.

Membership

Bickel was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Connections

On October 17, 1959, Bickel married Josephine Ann Napolino, with whom he had two children.

Father:

Solomon Bickel

Mother:

Yetta (Schafer) Bickel

Spouse:

Josephine Ann (Napolino) Bickel