{{Short description|American lawyer (1918–1999)}} {{Use mdy dates|date=February 2021}} {{Infobox officeholder | name = Philip Elman | image = | alt = | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = {{Birth date|1918|03|14}} | birth_place = Paterson, New Jersey, U.S. | death_date = {{Death date and age|1999|11|30|1918|03|14}} | death_place = Washington, D.C., U.S. | office = Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission | president = John F. Kennedy<br>Lyndon B. Johnson<br>Richard Nixon | term = April 21, 1961 – October 18, 1970 | education = City College of New York (BA)<br>Harvard University (LLB) | party = Independent | other_names = | occupation = | years_active = | known_for = | notable_works = }}
'''Philip Elman''' (March 14, 1918 – November 30, 1999) was an American lawyer at the United States Department of Justice and former member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Elman is best known for writing the government's brief in ''Brown v. Board of Education''.<ref name=NYTimes>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/05/us/philip-elman-81-government-lawyer-in-1954-desegregation-case.html|title=Philip Elman, 81, Government Lawyer in 1954 Desegregation Case (obituary)|last=Saxon|first=Wolfgang|date=December 5, 1999|work=The New York Times|access-date=October 1, 2009}}</ref> Elman is also notable for being one of just three political independents to have ever served on the FTC.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|title=Independent commissioners have shaped key FTC decisions - FTCWatch|url=https://www.mlexwatch.com/articles/2697/print?section=ftcwatch|access-date=2021-09-11|website=www.mlexwatch.com}}</ref>
==Early life and education== Elman was born in Paterson, New Jersey, to Polish-Jewish immigrants who worked in the silk industry. During the Great Depression, he moved with his family to New York City, where he attended DeWitt Clinton High School and the City College of New York. He went on to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the ''Harvard Law Review'' in 1938 and 1939.<ref name=HLR>''The Solicitor General's Office, Justice Frankfurter, and Civil Rights Litigation: An Oral History.'' 100 Harvard Law Review 4 [1987]</ref>
==Legal career==
===Judicial clerkships=== Elman began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Calvert Magruder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, 1939–1940. After a brief stint at the Federal Communications Commission (1940–1941), he served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1941 to 1943. Among the opinions Elman was involved in drafting during his clerkship was Frankfurter's dissent in the second Flag Salute case, ''West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette''.<ref name=Writ>{{cite web|url=http://writ.news.findlaw.com/books/reviews/20040521_newman.html|title= Justice Frankfurter's "Junior Partner": A Review of Norman Silber's Book on Philip Elman|last=Newman|first=Roger K.|date=May 21, 2004|work=Writ|publisher=FindLaw|access-date=October 1, 2009}}</ref> Elman and Frankfurter remained close friends; Elman would later recount that Frankfurter still regarded him as his clerk for years after Elman had joined the Justice Department.<ref name=HLR />
===Solicitor General's office===
After his clerkship with Frankfurter, Elman joined the United States Department of Justice, where he worked as an assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States from 1944 to 1961. He took part in drafting briefs and arguments for a number of civil rights cases, including ''Shelley v. Kraemer''.
In his oral history about his time at the Solicitor General's office, Elman recounted his involvement in ''Brown v. Board of Education''. He explained how the Solicitor General's brief used the phrase "with all deliberate speed":
<blockquote>It's because we were the first to suggest, and all the parties and amicus on both sides rejected it after the government proposed it, that if the Court should hold that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, it should give the district courts a reasonable period of time to work out the details and timing of the implementation of the decision. In other words, "with all deliberate speed".<ref name=HLR /></blockquote>
Elman wanted a "middle ground" between reaffirming the "separate but equal" doctrine of ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' and requiring immediate integration of all public schools, even though that meant separating the constitutional principle from the judicial remedy. He believed that otherwise the Supreme Court could not have decided the case unanimously and the American public would not have tolerated the decision.<ref name=HLR />
According to Elman, he borrowed the deliberate speed concept from antitrust cases and boundary dispute cases in the United States Supreme Court, particularly opinions by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., but he had difficulty tracking down the phrase's precise origin. Researchers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People later discovered the phrase in Francis Thompson's poem, ''The Hound of Heaven''.<ref name=HLR />{{citation needed|date=March 2016}}<!-- We need a citation to the phrase in the poem in a publicly available source -->
===Federal Trade Commission===
Elman wanted to become an Assistant Attorney General of the United States, but an interview with then-United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy did not go as he had hoped. Instead, Elman was nominated to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission. The United States Senate confirmed the nomination. Elman served on the FTC from 1961 to 1970.<ref name=NYTimes/>
While at the FTC, his main agenda was enforcing federal laws against false advertising. His actions led to the FTC requiring warning labels on cigarette packs in the United States.<ref name=Writ /> One of Elman's assistants at the FTC was a young Richard Posner, who went on to become a professor at University of Chicago Law School and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/posner-r/ Richard Posner's biography at University of Chicago Law School]</ref>
Since Elman's tenure, only two other political independents have served on the body: Mary Azcuenaga, who served from 1984 to 1998, and Pamela Jones Harbour, who served from 2003 to 2009.<ref name=":0"/>
==Later in life== Elman taught at Georgetown University Law Center from 1970 to 1976.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~law00050 |first=Philip |last=Elman |title=Papers, 1925–1979 |location=Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA |id=Call No. HOLLIS 2277376 |date=October 1990 }}</ref>
Elman admitted in his oral history that he and Justice Frankfurter conferred privately about the intended remedy in the case, which technically constituted a breach of judicial ethics. He was publicly criticized for this in 1987 by ''Time'' and ''The New York Times''. Elman defended both himself and Justice Frankfurter by stating that these discussions took place before the United States became a party to the case, and even then, the United States was not an adversary party but rather an ''amicus curiae''.<ref>{{cite magazine |url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,963917,00.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101022221639/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,963917,00.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=October 22, 2010 |title=Law: A Judge's Breach of Confidence |last1=Lacayo|first1=Richard|first2=Alain L. |last2=Sanders |date=April 6, 1987|magazine=Time |access-date=March 29, 2016}}</ref>
Elman died at Sibley Memorial Hospital in 1999.
==See also== * List of former FTC commissioners * List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 2)
==References== {{Reflist}}
==External links== * [https://books.google.com/books?id=zo_uUqRI5GIC ''With All Deliberate Speed: The Life of Philip Elman'' by Norman Silber] from Google Books * [https://web.archive.org/web/20041015014309/http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailPraise.do?id=17479 Review of Silber's book from University of Michigan Press]
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Elman, Philip}} Category:1918 births Category:1999 deaths Category:DeWitt Clinton High School alumni Category:City College of New York alumni Category:Harvard Law School alumni Category:Law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States Category:Federal Trade Commission personnel Category:United States Department of Justice lawyers Category:Lawyers from Paterson, New Jersey Category:American people of Polish-Jewish descent Category:Georgetown University Law Center faculty Category:Kennedy administration personnel Category:Lyndon B. Johnson administration personnel Category:Nixon administration personnel