Louis Nizer

Louis Nizer (February 6, 1902 – November 10, 1994) was a noted Jewish-American trial lawyer and senior partner of the law firm Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon.

The son of Joseph and Bella Nizer, he was born in London, before coming to the United States as a child. His father was the owner of a Brooklyn dry-cleaning business. As a youth, he won a government citation for his patriotic speeches during Liberty Loan drives in World War I.

He was a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia Law School. He twice won the Curtis Oratorical Prize as a Columbia undergraduate.

He co-founded a legal partnership with Louis Philips in 1924, which later grew into the legal firm of Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon. For a number of years, Nizer was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "highest-paid lawyer in the world". He represented many celebrities in a variety of cases, including Johnny Carson, Salvador Dalí, Mae West, Julius Erving, and Roy Fruehauf of the Fruehauf Trailer Corporation.

His most famous cases, however, involved representing Quentin Reynolds in his successful libel suit against columnist Westbrook Pegler, and representing the broadcaster John Henry Faulk against AWARE, a right-wing organization that had falsely labeled him a communist. His representation of Reynolds served as the basis for the Broadway play A Case of Libel, while his legal victory in the Faulk case was credited with "breaking the back of blacklisting in broadcasting."

In addition to his legal work, Louis Nizer was an author, artist, lecturer, and advisor to some of the most powerful people in the worlds of politics, business, and entertainment. He wrote several books, among them the best-selling "My Life In Court" in 1961, about many of his famous cases, which spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He also wrote "The Implosion Conspiracy" in 1972, a study of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case.

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