John Robert Risher Jr. (September 23, 1938 – February 21, 1999[1][2]) was an attorney who served, from 1976 until June 1978, as the first Corporation Counsel for Washington, D.C. appointed after it was granted Home Rule by the United States Congress.
After a short tenure as an Army officer in Korea, he became an attorney with the federal government at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then in the criminal fraud section of the Justice Department before being assigned to be a prosecutor in the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.
[2] Upon leaving federal service in 1968, Risher joined Arent Fox in 1968 as a civil litigator.
[2] Risher also taught as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and Howard University Law School and served as a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society and as the first president of the newly reconstituted District of Columbia Jewish Community Center.
After their divorce, he married Carol Seeger and they had two sons, Mark Eliot and Conrad Zachary.