John Hart Ely

John Hart Ely (December 3, 1938 – October 25, 2003) is one of the most widely cited legal scholars in United States history, ranking just after Richard Posner, Ronald Dworkin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., according to a 2000 study in the University of Chicago's Journal of Legal Studies.

Born in New York City, John Hart Ely graduated from Princeton University in 1960 and Yale Law School in 1963. 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, writing a first draft of a brief on behalf of Clarence Earl Gideon, a Florida drifter who had been tried and convicted without a lawyer.

In the fall of 1963, Ely trained with Company A of the U.S. Army's Military Police School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Ely served as the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He went on to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he considered a hero, and to whom he dedicated his landmark book, Democracy and Distrust (1980). As a clerk for Warren during the 1964 Term, Ely authored the landmark decision Hanna v. Plumer.

Joining the faculty of Yale Law School in 1968, and moving to Harvard Law School in 1973, Ely wrote several influential law review articles, including a highly critical analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in an article entitled "The Wages of Crying Wolf," published in the Yale Law Journal, wherein he argued that the Court's decision protecting abortion rights was wrong "because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

...
Wikipedia