Albert E. Arent

Albert E. Arent, attorney and educator, dedicated much of his life to humanitarian causes and the pursuit of civil liberties, civil rights, and social justice. After graduation from Cornell University and its Law School in 1935, he joined the many bright young American minds who traveled to Washington, D.C. to participate in the Roosevelt administration. As he would describe it years later, the U.S. capital then was still “a Southern city in the old tradition—with strict segregation in schools, hotels, restaurants, theaters, residential areas, and even medical care…The liberalizing influence of Roosevelt’s young crop of New Dealers was only beginning to be felt.”

A child of the Depression, for reasons of economic security Arent originally chose to pursue federal tax law and spent four years in the Office of the Chief Counsel of the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue. In 1939, however, he learned that Roosevelt’s liberal Attorney General, Frank Murphy, was about to establish a new unit within the Criminal Division of the U. S. Department of Justice devoted to the protection of civil liberties—the Civil Liberties Unit, subsequently known as the Civil Rights Section. Arent at once transferred to Justice to be part of the adventure.

At that time, the federal government rarely assumed jurisdiction in cases involving the infringement of civil liberties; nor did the states do very much to protect the rights embodied in the Federal Bill of Rights and the post-Civil War Constitutional amendments. The numerous civil rights statutes enacted in the aftermath of the Civil War had been repealed or declared unconstitutional in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, at the time Arent arrived at Justice, no effective means existed of bringing to justice in federal court some of the most notorious civil rights violations, including cases involving the Ku Klux Klan and police brutality. The Civil Rights Section was to change that.

The first step was to wrest jurisdiction of civil rights cases from state courts. To that end, Murphy directed Albert Arent and Irwin L. Langbein to analyze existing federal statutes on civil rights and to come up with a new approach. They did so by resurrecting two statutes passed in the Reconstruction era, 18 U.S.C. Sections 51 and 52. In a thirty-one-page memo citing these statutes sent to all United States Attorneys, the Civil Liberties Section argued that the federal government had the right to expand its jurisdiction into cases heretofore traditionally heard by state courts. The memo was historic: In the words of one legal scholar, “The preparation and circulation of this memo was a significant contribution to the law itself apart from any prosecution, for it placed the Justice Department on record as supporting the application of the civil rights statutes to contemporary civil liberties issues, including lynchings and mob violence.” The Justice Department then named Arent to go beyond the memo and to defend the new legal theories in court, which he did successfully in United States v. Cowan (U.S. District Court, New Orleans) and United States v. Sutherland (U.S. District Court, Atlanta). Arent’s groundbreaking work, and that of his handful of colleagues in the Civil Rights Section, set the stage for the enactment, decades later, of the momentous civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the growth of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, which today directs thousands of investigations each year in the defense of civil liberties.

Throughout his life Arent has been active in issues of particular concern to the American Jewish community. President Roosevelt’s 1938 nomination of Felix Frankfurter, one of the country’s most prominent Jewish intellectuals, to the Supreme Court had sparked opposition among some American Jews who feared that the appointment would incite an anti-Semitic backlash. Chastising such views, Arent wrote to the President in September 1938: “Those prominent Jews who are opposing the appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court of the United States in fear that anti-Semitism will be encouraged thereby, remind me of Neville Chamberlain. They are very generous in giving away the rights of others. Has it ever occurred to them that the consistent application of the policy which they advocate would require that they themselves yield their wealth and position to non-Jews and sink into innocuous obscurity? Your noble efforts to make democracy workable require the full utilization of the nation’s best talents, regardless of race or religion, and you will, I am confident, continue to ignore the cackling of scared chickens.” After the successful appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, Arent continued to play a prominent role in the affairs of the American Jewish community. He served as chairman of local and national organizations such as the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, and the Social Action Commission of Reform Judaism, where his efforts focused particularly on national policy issues such as immigration and civil rights.

Following the administration of Frank Murphy, Arent continued to serve as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General under both Robert Jackson and Frances Biddle. With the outbreak of World War II, however, his work moved from civil rights to the prosecution of major violators of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. From 1942-44, he served as a Chief Trial Attorney in the Alien Property Unit of the Justice Department, where he litigated alien property cases of national import.

In 1944, Albert Arent entered private practice as a founding partner of the law firm Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin and Kahn; he also taught for twenty-two years (1951-73) as Adjunct Professor of Tax Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and remained actively engaged in public policy issues. In the 1960s, Arent was a member of a small inter-faith committee that persuaded the Johnson administration to sponsor legislation removing ethnic bias from immigration laws. He was a founding member and life-long trustee of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, a trustee of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a founding member and member of the governing boards of Common Cause and of the National Urban Coalition. He served as a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees and as Chairman of the Cornell Law School Advisory Council.

For his work in both the public and private sectors Albert Arent has received numerous awards, among them Cornell University Law School’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, the Distinguished Service Award of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the prestigious Judge Learned Hand Award of the American Jewish Committee, named after the distinguished Senior Justice of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, universally recognized as a staunch advocate of civil rights.