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:
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)