Background
Paul Raymond Hays was born on April 2, 1903 in Des Moines, Iowa, United States. He was the son of S. Everett Hollingsworth Hays and Fae Susan Hatch.
Paul Raymond Hays was born on April 2, 1903 in Des Moines, Iowa, United States. He was the son of S. Everett Hollingsworth Hays and Fae Susan Hatch.
Hays graduated from Columbia University in 1924 and thereafter supported himself by teaching Greek and Latin while successively earning his Master of Arts (1927) and Bachelor of Law (1933) degrees from Columbia.
After passing the New York bar, Hays joined the prestigious New York City law firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine, and Wood in 1933. In 1936, Hays left private practice to serve as counsel to the National Recovery Administration, and thereafter he held a variety of positions in other federal agencies, including the War Labor Board, the Office of Alien Property, the Resettlement Administration, and the Justice Department. He pursued a second career teaching law at Columbia University, as an assistant professor from 1936 to 1938, associate professor from 1938 to 1943, and professor from 1943 to 1971. From 1957 to 1961 he held the Nash lectureship at Columbia.
From the mid-1940s on, Hays had a third career as a labor arbitrator. He served on the New York State Board of Mediation from 1940 to 1944 and on the New York City Board of Health from 1954 to 1960.
In 1952, Hays was appointed an arbitrator and helped to settle a particularly bitter New York longshoremen's dispute that had national implications.
After his election Kennedy rewarded Hays with an appointment to a judgeship on the prestigious Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which sat in New York City and heard all appeals from the federal courts of New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. Hays's colleagues on the Second Circuit bench included such noted judges as Harold Medina, Irving Kaufman, and Thurgood Marshall.
As a jurist, Hays typically recoiled from using his court platform as a means to make law or to challenge other branches of the federal government. He regularly deferred to federal administrative agencies, which he saw as "not only experts on legislative procedures but specialists in problems (within their areas of concern, such as) education (and) mental health. " In one of the most controversial and highly publicized cases of the Vietnam War era in 1971 Hays took the Nixon administration's side when it attempted to prevent the New York Times from publishing the so-called Pentagon Papers, a report of American involvement in Vietnam that documented the United States government's duplicity in the conduct of the war. The majority of the court, however, supported the Times.
In 1968, Hays voted to permit the importation of the erotic Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow). Reviewing the film, which he described as depicting scenes of "sexual intercourse some quite unusual, " Hays nonetheless concluded that it met the Supreme Court's standard of acceptability, in that "it cannot be said that 'the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex. ' " The ruling enabled film distributors to import many more European movies that had "adult" content, and thereby pushed Hollywood producers to create films that offered more realistic portrayals of matters involving sex. The ruling was a key step in the process that has led to the almost total abolition of the government's power - whether at the local, state, or national level- to regulate and censor the sexual content of books, films, plays, and other materials.
Hays' most significant ruling was in the case of Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission in 1965. The Federal Power Commission intended to create a major nuclear-power-generating plant at Storm King, a particularly scenic point along the Hudson River. Its plan was challenged by Scenic Hudson, an environmental group. In writing the court's majority opinion, Hays ruled for the first time anywhere in the United States court system that such citizens' groups as Scenic Hudson could challenge the decision of a federal agency not only on economic grounds but on the basis of "aesthetic, conservational, and recreational aspects of power development. "
In doing so, Hays almost single-handedly opened up the field of environmental law. In the course of his opinion, Hays noted that alternative sources of power had been proposed, and that four fishing groups "wished to show that the major spawning grounds for the distinct race of Hudson River striped bass was in the immediate vicinity of the Storm King project. " Hays ruled that the whole fisheries question be taken into consideration again by the Federal Power Commission. Eventually the commission held to its prior decision, and Hays - speaking for the court - concurred. But Scenic Hudson and other environmental groups had won the right to have their say in court. Hays had shown the way for the federal judiciary to consider environmental concerns, opening the door to passage of the federal National Environmental Policy Act a few years later.
Hays died in Tucson, Arizona, where he was vacationing.
Paul Raymond Hays was a prominent judge best known for his participation in the tribunal that ruled on the Pentagon Papers case. He extended a restraining order against publication by The New York Times of a secret Pentagon study (known as the Pentagon Papers) outlining the origins of the Vietnam War. Hays wrote the majority opinion in a 2–1 ruling that declared that the Swedish director Vilgot Sjoman’s 1967 film I Am Curious (Yellow) was not obscene. Hays was also a chairman of the Liberal Party which support helped Kennedy win a close contest in New York and thus its crucial electoral votes.
In 1958, Hays became chairman of New York's Liberal Party, a small but influential third party which, under Hays's leadership, played a key role in helping John F. Kennedy defeat Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.
On February 1, 1924, Hays married Eleanor K. Williams; they had one child. The couple divorced in 1943. On November 19, 1949, he married Elinor Rice; they had no children.
