Bruce Terris was the unsung hero of one of the most important constitutional developments of the modern era: the adoption of the one person, one vote standard. As his oral history recounts, while serving in the Solicitor General’s office during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, Terris developed the legal arguments, drafted the briefs, and argued in the Supreme Court in what became a series of landmark reapportionment rulings that required legislative districts to be similarly populated – an outcome that advanced the principles of both democracy and equality. Later in
his remarkable public life, Terris served on the National Crime Commission, worked in the White House on District of Columbia matters, helped establish one of the nation’s first public-interest law firms, and eventually founded and ran his own full-scale legal practice. Terris’s oral history was taken and is summarized here by Historical Society Board member Steven A. Steinbach.