Adrian S. Fisher

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adrian S. Fisher (1914 - 1983) was an American lawyer and federal public servant, who had the distinction of clerking for two Supreme Court Justices, Louis Brandeis (1938-39) and Felix Frankfurter (1939).^[1]

He was born on January 21, 1914 in Tennessee, and attended elite schools such as Groton School, Princeton University (BA 1934) and Harvard Law School (LLM 1938). Adrian Fisher was admitted to the Tennessee Bar in 1938. From 1941 to 1942, Fisher, who was known by his nickname "Butch" from his early days as a football player for Princeton (lettered, 1933), was assistant chief of the Foreign Funds Control Division of the United States Department of State. ^[2]

He was a bomber navigator in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1943, with missions over France, Belgium and Germany, and returned to Washington, D.C. as an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of War in 1944. From 1945 - 1947, he served as advisor to Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was, in turn, serving as the U.S. Prosecutor to the Nuremberg Trial. Fisher assisted in the drafting of the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which created the legal basis for the Nuremberg trials. Fisher then served as Solicitor, U.S. Department of Commerce from 1947 to 1948. Thereafter, Fisher became general counsel of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1948-49. He then served as legal advisor (with the rank of Assistant Secretary of State) to the Department of State (serving in the office of Secretary of State Dean Acheson) from 1949 to 1953. During 1952, Mr. Fisher served as legal advisor to the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations in Paris.

From 1961 to 1968, Fisher served as the Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in which he took a primary negotiations role during the Atomic Test Ban Treaty of 1961 between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At that time he was Deputy to John J. McCloy, Adviser to the President on Disarmament. In 1968, Fisher served as one of the chief U.S. negotiators of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and 59 other countries on July 1, 1968.^[3]

In 1968, Mr. Fisher entered private practice with Covington & Burling and became General Counsel to the Washington Post. Mr. Fisher's connection with the Post had arisen because of his close friendship with the Post's then-owner Donald Graham since his early days in Washington, D.C., when, in the late 1940's, he had shared a rented house (belonging to then Secretary of State Dean Acheson) with Phillip Graham and Donald Hiss (brother of Alger Hiss).

From 1969 to 1975, Mr. Fisher served as Dean of Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., and in 1981 he joined the George Mason University School of Law's faculty, in Arlington, Virginia, teaching various seminars on negotiation tactics. The George Mason Law Review named its annual award for best student article in honor of Mr. Fisher. From 1981 to 1982, Mr. Fisher served as an advisor to John J. McCloy during the hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (established by Congress in 1980). This commission reviewed the impact of Executive Order 9066 on Japanese-Americans and determined that they were the victims of discrimination by the Federal government.

Adrian S. Fisher died in 1983, aged 69, in Washington, D.C.

[edit] Notes