Honorees

John Hart Ely

1938-2003

John Ely was born in New York City and raised in both California and New York.  He served in the U.S. Army and  graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School. As a summer clerk at Arnold, Fortas, & Porter, a Washington, D.C. law firm, he assisted Abe Fortas in the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright (1961).  Ely wrote a first draft of a brief on behalf of Clarence Earl Gideon, a Florida drifter who had been tried and convicted without a lawyer.  As recounted in the famous book Gideon’s Trumpet by Anthony Lewis, Gideon had scrawled his petition for certiorari from a prison cell in his own handwriting.  The Supreme Court ruled in Gideon’s favor.

He studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Fulbright Scholar the year before he moved to San Diego and was employed by Defenders, Inc.  Ely served as the second youngest staff member of the Warren Commission (at age 25), which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  He went on to clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren on the Supreme Court, whom he considered a hero, and to whom he dedicated his landmark book, Democracy and Distrust (1980).

For a brief time in the 1960’s, John Ely worked in San Diego with Defenders, Inc.  Joining the faculty of Yale Law School in 1968, and moving to Harvard Law School in 1973, Ely wrote several influential law review articles.  Ely’s most notable work was his 1980 book Democracy and Distrust, which ranks as one of the most influential works about Constitutional law ever written.  In it, he argues against “interpretivism” of which Hugo Black was an exponent, “originalism” advanced by Robert Bork, and “textualism” advanced by Antonin Scalia.  His contention was “strict construction” fails to do justice to the open texture of many of the Constitution’s provisions.  At the same time, though, he maintains that the notion that judges may infer broad moral rights and values from the Constitution is radically undemocratic whether the “moralism” of Ronald Dworkin or the libertarian Richard Epstein.  Instead, Ely argued the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution so as to reinforce democratic processes and popular self-government.  This interpretation style ensured equal representation in the political process. Kathleen Sullivan described Ely’s Democracy and Distrust as “a masterpiece that combines elegant theory, raffish wit and a heartfelt search to get the role of the Supreme Court in American democracy just right.” (LA Times, 11/2/03).

A former student in his constitutional law class described Ely as “deeply read, witty, unaffected, plain-speaking, creative, and pragmatically wise.”  (Daniel Kornstien, New York Law Journal, 9/23/93). 

He went on to serve as dean of Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1987, and remained on the faculty until 1996.  He moved to the University of Miami School of Law in 1996 and was on its faculty when he died of cancer, aged 64. At the time of his death, his son Robert D. Ely stated that “He fought hard for those people who were under-represented in government because of their race, religion, and their economic or political situation.  That is what he stood for.” (Miami Herald, 10/27/03). 

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