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Edward Hirsch Levi served as U.S. attorney general from 1975 to 1976 under President Gerald R. Ford. Levi, who was a preeminent law professor, was the rare attorney general who did not have close political ties to the president. Ford chose him to help restore the credibility of the office, as two of his recent predecessors in the Nixon administration were charged with crimes. Though Levi did little substantively during his short tenure, he is credited with restoring public confidence in the Department of Justice.
Levi was closely tied to Chicago, Illinois, He was born there on June 26, 1911 and attended public schools. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago in the 1930s before finally leaving for New Haven, Connecticut to enter the doctoral program at Yale University.
After earning his doctorate in 1938, Levi returned to Chicago to become a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. During World War II he worked in the Department of Justice as a special assistant to the attorney general, specializing in antitrust regulation and prosecution. After the war he returned to his teaching position and in 1950 he was named the dean of the law school. During the 1950s he was an energetic scholar and writer, publishing many specialized articles on antirust law. A book he wrote in 1949 on legal reasoning was adopted by hundreds of professors and became part of a generation's legal education. As the years progressed, Levi's career shifted to educational administration. He was named provost of the university in 1962, and became its president in 1968.
During his career Levi also served on various government boards and task forces. These tours of duty were usually short, though Levi did serve as counsel to a congressional subcommittee investigating monopolies in several segments of the economy. Nevertheless, Levi's work in the 1960s and 1970s marked him as a government outsider. That changed in February 1975 when President Ford names Levi attorney general.
Ford was a unlikely president, appointed vice-president by Richard Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned the office in disgrace for accepting bribes as governor of Maryland. Then Nixon resigned in August 1974 as the House of Representatives prepared to pass articles of impeachment. The Watergate political scandal, the worst in U.S. history, had destroyed Nixon's political legitimacy. In addition, federal prosecutors pursued criminal indictments against a host of his senior advisors. Finally, former attorneys general John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst were found guilty of crimes.
Therefore, Ford believed a non-political appointee who had no direct ties to the president was essential to restore congressional and public confidence in the Department of Justice. Levi's appointment was greeted enthusiastically and the department's internal operations disappeared over the front pages of the nation's newspaper. Levi worked to restore the morale of career employees and to instill a new commitment to ethics in government. One of his first policies placed limits on the use of the FBI for political investigations.
Levi returned to the University of Chicago in 1977. He died on March 8, 2000 in Chicago.
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