Arthur Lawrence Liman[1] (November 5, 1932 – July 17, 1997) was an American lawyer and partner at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Liman's mother was valedictorian of her high school class, Phi Beta Kappa at Hunter College, and taught Latin.
Liman decided to attend the hearings because he had chosen to write his senior thesis on "the threat that McCarthy-style congressional investigations posed to our concepts of civil liberties and limited government.
He wrote that, due to Yale's teaching of legal realism, it "was the ideal place for a young man wary of orthodoxy.
"[2] Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education, "Yale taught me, above all, that lawyers could make a difference in the type of society that we had.
"[2] Upon graduation, Liman joined the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he became a partner and where he worked for most of his career.
Liman's experience as a prosecutor—and especially his exposure to the mandatory minimum sentences faced by the defendants he prosecuted—later informed his support for criminal justice reform.
The report observed that "[s]ave for the Wounded Knee massacre, the assault at Attica was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.
The Washington Post described the incident as: The Iran-Contra scandal burst upon the scene in November 1986 when it was first reported in a Lebanese newspaper that President Ronald Reagan had approved the sale of missiles to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon.
Later, Justice Department lawyers found evidence that proceeds from the arms sales had been diverted to illegally fund the contra anticommunist guerrillas in Nicaragua in circumvention of the Boland Amendment banning U.S. aid to the rebels.
It was an audacious, covert scheme -- known by its participants as "the Enterprise" -- carried out largely by a small group of top administration officials and private operators without the knowledge of Congress.
Two key witnesses – Lt. Col. Oliver North and Vice Adm. John Poindexter – refused to state that President Reagan had played any role in the covert actions.
The program also awards summer fellowships to students at Barnard, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Spelman, and Yale to pursue public interest-themed projects at organizations across the country.