Legal Career
In 1929 Hall ran for election as Los Angeles city attorney but lost to Erwin P. Werner in the June final, 152,566 to 82,444. He was in private practice from 1929 to 1934, when he was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, a post he fulfilled until 1937.
He was a Superior Court judge between 1939 and 1942, then was appointed U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District effective July 3, 1942. He was chief judge from 1959 to 1964. He was reassigned to the Central District of California in 1966 and assumed senior status in 1968. He was head of the Selective Service System for Southern California in 1941.
Some of the cases he dealt with in his court included:
- Trial of an army officer charged with stealing $106,000 in Japanese gold missing since the surrender of Formosa (Taiwan) to U.S. forces at the end of World War II.
- Jailing of 10 people for refusal to answer questions in a grand jury proceeding about Los Angeles Communist leaders and organizations.
- Freeing of war crimes suspect Andrija Artukovic, former interior minister in Croatia, when Hall ruled that no extradition treaty existed between the United States and Yugoslavia, which had sought Artukovic for trial.
Read more about this topic: Peirson Mitchell Hall
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or career:
“Hawkins: The will is not exactly in proper legal phraseology. Richard: No: my father died without the consolations of the law.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)