Bickel, Alexander M.

Alexander Mordecai Bickel was born in 1924. He emigrated to the United States from Romania in 1938. After serving in the United States Army, he graduated from the City College of New York in 1947, and the Harvard Law School in 1949. He was a law clerk to Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1952 to 1953. Bickel was a professor at the Yale Law School from 1956 until his death in 1974. He published nine books and more than one hundred articles on law, government, political reform, the Supreme Court, and legal history. He was an associate editor of The New Republic; a writer for other popular journals; a military intelligence officer attached to the High Commissioner for Germany and the State Department, and an advisor on desegregation bills and other social legislation from 1958 to 1974. Bickel was active in the Democratic Party, especially between 1967 and 1969. He died in New Haven on November 7, 1974.

Alexander Mordecai Bickel, professor in Yale Law School and contributing editor of The New Republic, was a pre-eminent scholarly and popular authority on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the roles of the several branches of government in shaping public policy. Speaking and writing as teacher, scholar, lawyer, journalist, Democrat, and adviser to government officials, he was in the 1960s and early 1970s an important contributor to national discussion of such legal and political subjects as school desegregation, reapportionment, the Electoral College, the interpretation of the First Amendment, the powers of the President, the significance of the Warren Court, and the meaning of the liberal tradition. These are among the principal events in his personal and professional life: