Friday, October 12, 2007
Page 3
Southwestern Professor Emeritus Lawrence Sullivan Dies at 84
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Private services will be held for Professor Emeritus Lawrence A. Sullivan of Southwestern University School of Law, who died Sunday at age 84 after a fight with cancer, the school said yesterday.
Sullivan, whose treatise on antitrust law has been cited in hundreds of opinions, “embodied all of the values that law schools seek in a professor,” Dean Bryant Garth said. He was “valued by students for his gentle but passionate and precise teaching, and esteemed by faculty as a generous and nurturing colleague,” the school said in a statement.
His work was honored at a symposium held at Southwestern in February of this year.
Sullivan grew up in New York City, where his father, Charles P. Sullivan, served as district attorney for Queens County. After service as a control tower operator in India during World War II, he studied economics at UCLA, graduated magna cum laude, and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard.
After clerking for Calvert Magruder, then the chief judge of the federal First Circuit, Sullivan joined the faculty at Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley as a visiting associate professor. He then returned to Boston to join the firm of Foley, Hoag, & Elliot, where he stayed for a decade and a half before returning to Boalt in 1967.
He eventually became acting dean of the school and director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute. He took emeritus status in 1991, when he married Joan Sears Sullivan, and came to Southwestern, where he taught courses on antitrust, intellectual property, regulation and deregulation in the telecommunications industries, the European Union, and software and Internet law and played a key role in the development of the Biederman Entertainment and Media Law Institute.
He took emeritus status in 2005.
Appointed by then-President Carter to the National Commission for the Review of Antitrust Laws and Procedures, Sullivan also served as a consultant on antitrust issues to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Energy; the Senate and House subcommittees on antitrust; the Federal Trade Commission, the California attorney general, and the governments of Australia and Brazil.
He lectured on antitrust and European Union issues before a myriad of national and international forums. In 1991, he was awarded the Berkeley Citation by UC Berkeley, and in 1992, the California State Bar Antitrust and Trade Regulation Section named him “Antitrust Lawyer of the Year.”
Sullivan and Southwestern Professor Warren Grimes recently published a revised and expanded edition of The Law Of Antitrust: An Integrated Handbook, and the pair was honored in May with the American Antitrust Institute’s Fifth Annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for the second edition of their treatise.
In a tribute posted on the institute’s Web site Tuesday, Grimes wrote:
“As a scholar, Larry was careful, scrupulously fair, but never hesitant to advocate for results he believed in. He believed in antitrust as a principled and effective way to maintain competition and discipline market abuses. That did not prevent him from criticizing decisions that imposed antitrust liability where he thought none was warranted. He taught many a younger colleague how blend and balance a thorough and careful analysis with articulate and persuasively stated conclusions.”
Sullivan also collaborated with Professor Eleanor Fox of New York University Law School on Cases and Materials on Antitrust, which is also used in law school antitrust courses around the country.
In a statement yesterday, Fox called Sullivan “a humanist, a historian, and a person who valued people.”
Sullivan “thought about the law’s impact on people and worried about misuses of power and wealth,” Fox commented. “Even as antitrust law became so technical and lost sight of its origins, he never did.”
Antitrust litigator Maxwell Blecher described Sullivan as “a towering figure in the world of antitrust law who made monumental contributions to its development and understanding,” who “was also a warm and caring human being.”
He also traveled, in particular to Ireland, and was an accomplished saxophonist and jazz aficionado, the school noted in his release.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons from his first marriage, Larry B. Sullivan, Mark Sullivan, and Neil Sullivan; three stepsons, Eric Sears, Douglas Sears; and and Jonathan Sears; stepdaughter Emily Sears Vaughn; 10 grandchildren and one great-grandson.
The family requested that memorial donations be made to the Professor Lawrence A. Sullivan Memorial Scholarship Endowment Fund at the law school., whose address is 3050 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90010-1106.
Copyright 2007, Metropolitan News Company