Walter Gellhorn, Law Scholar And Professor, Dies at 89
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Walter Gellhorn, the longtime Columbia University law professor whose writings, teachings and periodic sallies into the public arena helped shape key elements of modern American law, died on Saturday at his home in Morningside Heights. He was 89. Until a few days ago, Mr. Gellhorn, known as a fierce champion of civil liberties and a father of both modern administrative law and of the ombudsman movement in the United States, had made daily visits to his Columbia office, where he maintained a flourishing retirement sideline as a labor mediator. In a long and varied career, Mr. Gellhorn wrote and lectured extensively on a range of issues, but for all the complexities of the abstruse principles he probed and elucidated, you did not have to delve far into Gellhorn to find the wellspring of his intellectual vision. For he was a scholar who wore his passions on the spines of his books, among them, “Security, Loyalty and Science” (1950), “Individual Freedom and Governmental Restraints” (1956), “American Rights: the Constitution in Action” (1960), and “The Freedom to Read,” a 1961 collaboration. It was his very commitment to individual rights that underlay his most acclaimed legal achievement, his role as an architect and continuing scholarly watchdog of the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. The law, highly influenced by Mr. Gellhorn’s writings, specifically applies the Constitutional notions of fairness and due process to the shadowy back alleys of the American legal system, the welter of delegated rules and regulations promulgated, administered and enforced by Federal agencies. Throughout his career, Mr. Gellhorn was closely associated with the developments of administrative law. He was a perennial member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and his “Administrative Law: Cases and Comments,” revised many times since its initial publication in 1941, has been regarded as the standard text. More : query.nytimes.com |