Arthur L. Liman

Arthur Lawrence Liman (November 5, 1932 – July 17, 1997) was a partner at the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and was well known for his public service.

Arthur Liman was born on November 5, 1932, in Far Rockaway, Queens and spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Long Island. Liman's grandparent were Jewish émigrés from Russia and settled in New York City. Liman's mother was valedictorian of her high school class, Phi Beta Kappa at Hunter College, and taught Latin. His father graduated from City College of New York and taught history in public schools before joining his father's dressmaking business. Liman's older sister Gladys, a graduate of Smith College, was a poet.

Liman attended Harvard University, where he studied political science and graduated in 1954. Liman wrote in his memoir that he decided to become a lawyer after observing a day of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, known colloquially as the "McCarthy Hearings." Liman decided to attend the hearings because he had chosen to write his senior thesis on "the threat that McCarthy-style congressional investigations posed to our concepts of civil liberties and limited government." Liman recalled that "[b]y the time the spectacle ended, I was shaken to the core."

Liman pursued his law degree from Yale Law School, and graduated in 1957. He wrote that, due to Yale's teaching of legal realism, it "was the ideal place for a young man wary of orthodoxy." Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education, "Yale taught me, above all, that lawyers could make a difference in the type of society that we had."

Upon graduation, Liman joined the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he became a partner and where he worked for most of his career. Liman quickly became a trial lawyer, and "I never looked back." Liman's practice focused on commercial litigation and corporate criminal defense. Clients included Wall Street magnate Michael Milken and media conglomerate Time Warner.

Throughout, Liman devoted large portions of his time to public service. He served as an Assistant United States attorney under Robert Morganthau from 1961-1963. There, he focused on securities fraud and also took on drug prosecutions in order to gain trial experience. Liman's experience as a prosecutor—and especially his exposure to the mandatory minimum sentences faced by the defendants he prosecuted—later informed his support for criminal justice reform.

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