In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

183 twenty-five Managing the Dilworth Litigation Department America is the paradise of lawyers. —Justice David J. Brewer Back at the Dilworth firm, I continued to be actively engaged in litigation and corporate matters. On February 12, 1962, Mayor Dilworth had resigned to run for governor of Pennsylvania. He was solidly defeated by William Scranton by more than half a million votes. Scranton, a Republican representative from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a worthy opponent. It hadn’t hurt that his brother-in-law, the editor of Time magazine, had put Scranton’s picture on the cover of Time a week before the election. Dilworth told me he was happy that the margin of his loss was so great because he did not lie awake at night wondering whether with one more speech or one more visit to a rural county, he might have won. The good news was that Dilworth returned to our law firm in 1963. The new mayor of Philadelphia, James Tate, appointed him president of the Philadelphia school board, a nonpaying job. Mayor Tate also instructed the Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW), which was owned by the City, to retain the Dilworth firm with me as the lead outside counsel. The operator of PGW was the United Gas Improvement Company, a publicly owned company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. For many decades the outside law firm for Philadelphia Gas Works and United Gas was Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius. In a devilish mood Dilworth asked me to pay a visit to Arthur W. Littleton, the distinguished leader of Morgan, Lewis, and inform him of the City’s decision to transfer legal representation of PGW to the Dilworth firm, and to arrange for the delivery of all the files in pending litigation, regulatory, and transactional matters. Since Morgan, Lewis’s office was three floors below the Dilworth firm’s, in the Fidelity Philadelphia Trust Building, it wasn’t a long journey. But Dilworth was well aware that Littleton had refused to interview me for a job at Morgan, Lewis when I had applied there after my clerkship with Justice Frankfurter. 04-0488-1 part4.indd 183 9/9/10 8:28 PM 184 / a philadelphia lawyer Dilworth obviously had called Littleton in advance. Littleton’s greeting was friendly and courteous. He pledged to cooperate fully with us in the transfer of all representations to our firm, with one exception. We had no lawyers in the Dilworth firm, he said, with experience in natural gas regulatory matters nor any office in Washington, where the Federal Power Commission hearings took place. I explained to Littleton that since Philadelphia was only 140 miles from Washington and the trains ran every hour until well after midnight, it would not be inconvenient for our firm to participate in Federal Power Commission hearings. I further noted that Congress had not enacted the Natural Gas Act until 1938, and the Supreme Court had not ruled that the Federal Power Commission had jurisdiction over pricing and service contracts between natural gas producers and the interstate pipelines until the Philips case in 1954. We were therefore confident that our firm could complete our review of all the appellate decisions and rulings of the Federal Power Commission and be ready to undertake the work immediately. Littleton reluctantly agreed to turn over all the files in pending matters, as the City had directed. The following Monday I plunged into the extensive PGW files. I was assisted by a young associate, Robert Maris, the son of Albert B. Maris, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who had recently joined the firm. Maris was a summa cum laude graduate of Haverford College and a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and he’d been a member of Penn’s law review. He had just finished a clerkship with a fine judge on the Court of Common Pleas, Edmond Spaeth. Bob was articulate and hard working. Many a written brief and article bearing my name reflects his talented writing skill. While Bob Maris and I fully immersed ourselves in the arcane world of natural gas regulation, there was a flurry of discovery, motions, briefs, and preliminary hearings in the Federal Power Commission proceedings.1 The commission’s decisions were routinely appealed to the District of Columbia Court or the Fifth Circuit Court and then up to the Supreme Court. From 1965 through 1968 I argued and won four cases in the U...

Share