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| Photo by Judy Sanders/Wildsands |
I haven’t really managed the paperless office. I could probably throw out half this stuff,” admits Professor George Brown, indicating bookshelves crammed with volumes of the Harvard Law Review and the Supreme Court Reporter, “but I don’t like to throw things out.”
One pile of paper that has preoccupied
Brown recently is a 113-page printout of
the June 2006 Supreme Court decision in
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The case struck
down military commissions established by
the Bush administration to try people
detained on suspicion of involvement in
terrorist activities, and was widely seen as
“a great rebuke of presidential power,”
according to Brown. “This is a very difficult
case,” he says, leafing through the
heavily underlined pages. “I’ve been reading
it for a month, and I still don’t fully
understand it.”
The frank admission denotes the caution
and attention to nuance of a scholar
whose eminence in the legal academy guarantees
that attention will be paid to his
opinions. In August 2006, Brown was
named as the inaugural holder of the
Robert Drinan, SJ, Chair at Boston College
Law School. “George
has been the intellectual leader of this faculty
for thirty-five years,” says Dean John
Garvey, “and this recognition of his leadership
is long overdue.”
Nationally known for his work in the
fields of government ethics, political corruption,
and federal-state relations, Brown
has turned recently to the study of terrorism
and the relationship between the courts
and the political branches of government.
“The whole question of how we reconcile
our commitment to civil liberties with the
very harsh realities of the war on terror is
one of the most important issues facing the
country,” he says.
For Brown, a central concern is the
extent to which the courts should “show
deference to the executive branch, particularly
in the decisions that it makes in
the war on terror.” His grasp of the
dynamic tension between different
branches of government comes from
first-hand experience, as Assistant State
Attorney General under Elliott Richardson
in 1968, and as Legislative Assistant
to Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent
from 1969–1971.
Brown’s fascination with the intersecting
worlds of current events, politics, and
the law developed while he was a French
major and later a graduate student in Paris
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, seeking
to understand anti-American feeling in
France. He switched from French to law,
thinking that law school would offer more
opportunities to explore these issues.
Almost from the day he entered Harvard
Law School, Brown was drawn to the
life of the legal academic, with its potential
for balancing scholarship with participation
in public life. But a short spell of
teaching after graduation convinced him
that he needed to season his academic
interests with real-world experience, and
he headed for Beacon Hill.
That taste of public service proved
invaluable, when as Chair of the State
Ethics Commission from 1994 to 1998
under Governor William Weld, Brown
investigated reported breaches of conflict
of interest statutes by officials at the state,
county, and local levels. Cases were often
far from clear-cut, says Brown, and having
been a public servant, he could see
both sides of an issue. He also took the
initiative in mending fences between the
Commission and the state legislature, by
holding an hour-long question and
answer session with legislators in the State
House—the first time such a dialogue had
been attempted.
When not parsing Supreme Court decisions, teaching, or keeping up what Dean Garvey calls a “constant stream” of influential articles, Brown can often be found fishing in the upper reaches of the Charles River, sometimes with his colleague and friend Professor Zygmunt Plater. Since Brown’s daughter moved to London, he has also discovered the pleasures of exploring the city’s neighborhoods on foot. And although he gave up the formal study of French decades ago, Brown and his wife, Pat, regularly vacation in the Perigord region of France to savor “la douceur de vivre.””
-Jane Whitehead