John Sheehy

Background

John Sheehy was born on July 4, 1917, in Hoboken, New Jersey, a city in Hudson County on the Hudson River opposite Manhattan. Hoboken's land had long been dominated by the Stevens family, which at one time owned the entire city.

Education

Sheehy received a Bachelor of Science from Fordham University in 1938. Fordham was founded in 1841 as St. John's College, opening at Rose Hill in the Bronx with six students. The Society of Jesus took over the college in 1846, and the institution became Fordham University in 1907 after adding law and medicine schools. Today it is a Jesuit research university in New York City.

He earned a Master of Science from Columbia University in 1947. The university's origins date to King's College, founded in 1754. Its law school was established in 1858 as the Columbia College Law School, with Theodore Dwight as its first warden, and the university moved to its present Upper West Side campus in 1897.

Sheehy completed a Juris Doctor at Seton Hall University in 1954. The university was founded in 1856 as Seton Hall College by Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley. Its law school opened on February 5, 1951, at the former John Marshall Law School site in Jersey City, after New Jersey's Supreme Court required bar candidates to hold degrees from ABA-accredited schools. The school moved to Newark in September 1951 and graduated its first class in 1954.

Career

Sheehy was admitted to the bar of New Jersey and the United States in 1955. He was later admitted to practice before the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, the United States Tax Court in 1964, and the United States Supreme Court in 1969.

He became a partner of Sheehy & Sheehy, a law firm founded in 1955 whose headquarters were at the Five Corners area of Jersey City, New Jersey. His practice covered tax, corporation, probate, real estate, negligence, casino law, and trial and appeal work.

From 1957 to 1973 he was a lecturer on law at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. By 1957 the school had been operating in Newark for about six years, having moved there in September 1951.

From 1973 to 1978 he served as counsel to the Parking Authority of Jersey City, and from 1974 to 1977 he was counsel to the Hudson County Pollution Financing Authority. Such authorities are public bodies created to finance or operate specified facilities, and legal counsel serves them in matters of law. Casino law developed in New Jersey after voters approved casino gambling in 1976, and the first Atlantic City casino opened in 1978.

Membership

Sheehy's bar affiliations centered on the Hoboken Bar Association, a local organization of lawyers, and on county, state, and national bar associations. He served as president of the Hoboken Bar Association from 1969 to 1970. The American Bar Association, founded in 1878 as a national voluntary organization of lawyers, organizes its members into subject-based sections, and Sheehy belonged to sections covering taxation, insurance, negligence and compensation law, and local government from 1959.

• President

  Hoboken Bar Association , United States

  1969 - 1970

• Hudson County Bar Association , United States

• New Jersey State Bar Association , United States

• Member of the Taxation, Insurance, Negligence and Compensation Law, and Local Government sections

  American Bar Association , United States

  1959