Thomas Irwin Emerson papers

Thomas Irwin Emerson was born on July 12, 1907, in Passaic, New Jersey. He graduated from Yale College in 1928 and from the Yale Law School in 1931. Upon graduation from law school, Emerson worked for two years at the New York law firm of Engelhard, Pollak, Pitcher and Stern. In 1931, he served on the defense team in Powell v. Alabama, the suit that successfully overturned the convictions of the "Scottsboro Boys" and is considered a groundbreaking case in establishing a defendant's right to counsel. Emerson left the law firm in 1933 and went to work for the federal government. He spent thirteen years in Washington, D.C., working for seven government agencies during the period of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. He began as assistant counsel for the National Recovery Administration. From there, he went to the National Labor Relations Board, the Social Security Board, the National Labor Relations Board again, the Department of Justice, and the Office of Price Administration. He completed his time as a government employee with assignments as general counsel for the Office of Economic Stabilization and the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. His memoirs from this period were published in 1991 in the book Young Lawyer for the New Deal: An Insider's Memoir of the Roosevelt Years. In 1946, Emerson joined the Yale Law School faculty. He taught at the law school until 1976. He was a popular professor among students and taught such courses as Political and Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, and Administrative Process. His publications included over one hundred articles and briefs as well as two highly regarded scholarly works, Political and Civil Rights in the United States with David Haber, first published in 1952, and The System of Freedom of Expression published in 1970.

Throughout his life, Emerson was a passionate civil libertarian. His organizational activity demonstrated the importance he assigned to the protection of civil liberties. He was active in both the American Civil Liberties Union and the New Haven Civil Liberties Council, later called the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union. He served as an advisor to the Civil Liberties Educational Foundation and as a member of the national council for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He fought against repressive government legislation in the National Committee to Abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation and opposed the Federal Loyalty Program. Emerson also defended civil liberties in the courtroom. In 1957, he argued and won a case before the Supreme Court, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, that reinforced the right to academic freedom. In the 1960s, he contributed to the effort to secure the release of Morton Sobell, convicted in 1951 of espionage and detained in prison past the duration of his sentence. In recognition of his defense of civil liberties, he received the inaugural American Civil Liberties Union's Medal of Liberty in 1984.

In 1965, Emerson argued before the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut that the Connecticut state law forbidding the use of contraceptives was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor and, as part of the decision, recognized a right to privacy under the Constitution for the first time. Legal scholars consider the case the precursor to the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. He further demonstrated his commitment to women's rights as a member of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women and the Connecticut Women's Educational and Legal Fund and by campaigning for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

Emerson's organizational affiliations and defense of civil liberties during the reactionary period in the United States after World War II resulted in government surveillance. Copies of records Emerson obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request document the Federal Bureau of Investigation's observance of him between 1941 and 1977. The investigation began as series of background checks for Emerson's various government positions and intensified as a result of his involvement in the National Lawyers Guild, an organization attacked as a Communist front during the 1940s, and his co-authoring of an article in 1948 criticizing the Federal Loyalty Program. The FBI's efforts to connect him with the Communist Party included trying to place him with a Communist cell in Seattle, Washington, a city Emerson had never visited. Emerson steadfastly denied Communist Party membership and the FBI failed in its attempts to prove otherwise.

Thomas Emerson and his first wife, Bertha Paret, had three children: Joan, Robert and Luther. Later, Emerson married Ruth Calvin. Thomas Emerson died June 19, 1991, in New Haven, Connecticut.