Laurence H. Silberman

Laurence Hirsch Silberman (born October 12, 1935) is a senior federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed in October 1985 by Ronald Reagan and took Senior status on November 1, 2000.

Silberman with President George W. Bush and former U.S. Senator from Virginia Chuck Robb at a White House press conference announcing the formation of the Iraq Intelligence Commission which he would co-chair with Robb, February 6, 2004.

Silberman graduated from Dartmouth College in 1957 and Harvard Law School in 1961. He served in the United States Army from 1957 to 1958. He has been a partner in law firms in Honolulu and Washington, D.C., as well as a banker in San Francisco. He served in government as an attorney in the NLRB's appellate section, Solicitor of the Department of Labor from 1969 to 1970 and Undersecretary of Labor from 1970 to 1973. As Deputy Attorney General of the United States from 1974 to 1975, he had to read J. Edgar Hoover's secret files, which he describes as "the single worst experience of my long governmental service".[1].

He was Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1975 to 1977. From 1981 to 1985, he served as a member of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament and the Defense Policy Board. He was an Adjunct Professor of Administrative Law at Georgetown University Law Center from 1987 to 1994 and in 1997 and 1999, at NYU from 1995 to 1996, at Harvard in 1998. He was a member of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review during the first time it was ever called into session in 2002. Silberman is also a friend of Clarence Thomas, and encouraged a young and then-reluctant Thomas to take up a federal judgeship at the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

On 6 February 2004, Silberman was appointed co-chair of the Iraq Intelligence Commission, an independent panel created to investigate U.S. intelligence surrounding the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He is currently teaching Administrative law and Labor law at Georgetown University Law Center. In the wake of the resignation of Alberto Gonzalez as United States Attorney General, Silberman was mentioned as a possible successor.[2]