A Memorial to Walter Gelhorn

by Peter Strauss

On December 9, 1995, at age 89, Walter Gellhorn died, peacefully and at home, after a long illness he had successfully concealed from his admirers and friends. We will remember him as one of the most influential administrative law figures of the century and, particularly, as an extraordinary human being. No sooner had I landed on Columbia's doorstep, thirty-five years after he began teaching here, than he became my mentor and guide. I seem to have spent all the time since that day learning at his feet the inadequacies of a time like this to celebrate extraordi- nary contributions and an extraordinary life.

That Gellhorn was a scholar of piercing insight and deep commitment is amply testified by his subjects of study -- the family court, the ombudsman, agencies as they were -- and his accomplishments. The first Law School professor named to a University Professorship, he twice won Harvard's triennial Henderson Prize, the country's highest award for administrative law scholarship; for more than half a century, his vision of American administrative law dominated law school presentations of that subject. But characteristically he insisted on dealing with agencies as human, political institutions in the real world, and that forbade heady generalization. Many of us were with Walter at the Section's fall meeting last October, when he and Clark Byse opened the National Archives' display commemorating the 50th birthday of the Administrative Procedure Act. The studies the Attorney General's Committee on Administrative Procedure performed under his direction in 1940-41 were exemplars of field biology, not theoretical physics. Its twenty-seven monographs describing the variety of decision processes employed by government agencies, and the resulting summary report stand as classics of administrative law scholarship; they remain as good an account as we have of the day-to-day functioning of federal administration.

Walter Gellhorn's commitment to the understanding and improvement of administrative law on the ground was reflected in his many contributions to our Section and, strikingly, in his relationship to the Administrative Conference of the United States. Our October celebration fell under the shadow of Congress's refusal to renew ACUS's annual appropriation. Professor Gellhorn had served continuously on the Council of that agency through the terms of seven Presidents, from its founding through its October defunding. While surely he had views and the purpose to put them forward, he also had the capacity to hear the interests and needs of others and to reflect them fairly and fully in any report he might make. The Administrative Conference was a body a person might think designed for failure -- 100 lawyers periodically brought together from private and public practice, of every political persuasion, to attempt consensus on proposals for reform of this or that aspect of administrative procedure. He was the glue that held it together. Walter endlessly promoted the research projects that produced its diet of recommendations, and the young careers in administrative law scholarship that went with them. In the Assembly, he would listen patiently to the debate, gauge the moment, and then suggest the words that would propel us into the realization, once again, that we could agree.

Walter was also, perhaps primarily, a generator of success and fulfillment for others. Any conversation with alumni about Walter Gellhorn, I quickly learned, would soon turn to how it was Professor Gellhorn who sparked this interest, found me that job. How many of our most distinguished alumni became what they were in response to his guidance, because of a telephone call he made on their behalf! For a young colleague, an anxious and sensitive one at that, the hand was light, but its presence constant. Wouldn't his new colleague appreciate the chance to study the operation of some government agency through ACUS -- the Bureau of Land Management, as it turned out -- to see how administrative law worked outside the Beltway, perhaps to contribute to its improvement in some small way? Wouldn't he like the chance to be involved with the Bar's Section of Administrative Law, with the opportunities that would present to encounter administrative law in its practice? Teaching appealed to Gellhorn, one came to appreciate, not only for its intellectual qualities, but for the opportunities it provided to be beneficial to others. It was, as he would often say, the one place in the legal profession that never obliged you on behalf of one to seek the disadvantage of another.

That there were no universal truths was Gellhorn's one universal truth -- one reason he never succumbed to the ego-gratification of a treatise, the summative account others urged upon him. There were instead the ever-growing clipping files, the hundreds of pages of teacher's manual freely sharing insights and questions that might lead acolytes into the forest, his constant commitment to and support for study of administrative law and agencies as they were, reform and improvement at the margins, responsive to the complex realities of particular programs. And there was the spreading pool of administrative law scholarship that he could see, with pleasure, sprang from his efforts, whether or not their role was ever fully acknowledged. It appears that we need him still, that we need particularly the nonpartisan attention to facts on the ground and the realities of procedural operation that so characterized Walter Gellhorn's long life in administrative law.