Biography
Bickel was born to Jewish parents (Solomon and Yetta Bickel), originally from Bucharest, Romania, who had immigrated to Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from Harvard Law School summa cum laude. He served as a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1952 term, preparing a historical memorandum urging that Brown v. Board of Education be reargued. Starting in 1956, he taught at Yale Law School until his death. With Charles Black, he forged what has become one of the world's great centers for the study of constitutional law.
A frequent contributor to Commentary, New Republic and the New York Times, Bickel argued against "prior restraint" of the press by the government as part of the successful representation of the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case (1971). He also defended President Richard Nixon’s order to dismiss special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Bickel
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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