The remarkable life and career of Nathan Lewin, one of the foremost advocates for religious freedom in the past 50 years, is now the subject of his oral history just published by the Historical Society. Born in 1936 in Lodz, Poland, with the specter of Nazi Germany hovering over his family, Lewin describes the tense moments as his mother and father sought to escape Poland. Shortly after Hitler invaded, Lewin was shepherded into Lithuania at the age of three, along with his parents, maternal grandparents, and uncle. Fighting to escape, his mother eventually found a sympathetic man in the Japanese consulate, Chiune Sugihara, to provide the family with a transit visa in August 1940. Traveling through Russia, then Japan, Lewin and his family finally arrived in the United States in March 1941.
What followed was a career not to be forgotten: graduation from Harvard (in the same class as Justice Scalia), a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II (and his conversations with Justice Harlan about whether Lewin’s strict observation of the Sabbath would make a difference in being hired), joining the Jimmy Hoffa prosecution in the DOJ, serving in the Solicitor General’s office before becoming a founding member of the boutique firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, and then arguing countless times
in the Supreme Court and lower courts on behalf of Jews and other religious minorities seeking to ensure their constitutional right to freedom of religious expression. And for good measure, along the way Lewin found himself presenting argument with his partner Jack Miller in the Supreme Court on behalf of Richard Nixon, and later representing then-Attorney General Edwin Meese in the second Independent Counsel investigation of Meese in 1988.
This oral history is a fascinating read, replete with recollections of the workings of the Supreme Court in the early 1960s, observations on the evolution of constitutional litigation over the meaning of the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, and descriptions of scores of other events in the Washington legal community over the past 65 years. Don’t miss it. Read his oral history here.