Council Member John P. Frank, 84, Is Dead

John P. Frank of Phoenix, a practitioner, historian, and scholar who played a major role in the racial desegregation cases of the 1950’s, represented Ernesto Miranda in the 1966 landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court held Miranda’s confession to have been involuntary because it had not been proceeded by warnings against self-incrimination, and advised Anita Hill during her testimony in the 1992 confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, died on September 7 at a Scottsdale hospital after suffering a heart attack at home. Mr. Frank, who was an active member of the Institute’s Council for 29 years, was 84.

Mr. Frank was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and of its Law School and taught for five years at Yale Law School before moving to Phoenix and joining the firm of Lewis and Roca, where he remained until his death. He worked tirelessly to open the legal profession to women and minorities. One of his protégées at Lewis and Roca was Mary M. Schroeder, who became the firm’s first woman associate and later its first woman partner and who later became Mr. Frank’s colleague on the Institute’s Council; she is now Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Another was Janet Napolitano, now Attorney General and Governor-Elect of Arizona. A prolific author, Mr. Frank was the author of 11 books, including American Law: The Case for Radical Reform, Marble Palace: The Supreme Court in American Life, and Lincoln as a Lawyer, which was hailed as a classic by Herbert Mitgang in The New York Times.

Mr. Frank became a member of the Institute in 1962 and joined the Council in 1973. He was an Adviser to the abortive Second Restatement of Restitution and chaired the Special Committee on the ALI’s 75th Anniversary, in which capacity he arranged a series of special programs at the 75th Annual Meeting in 1998 and wrote a characteristically vivid capsule history of the Institute’s first 75 years for the special publication produced on that occasion.