Here are excerpts from Wyatt Well’s review at the Antitrust Source along with a picture of the man:

About Thurman Arnold’s career:

Arnold had a remarkably varied career. He practiced law briefly in Chicago, served in the Army in World War I, practiced law with his father in Laramie while serving in the state legislature and as mayor of Laramie, was dean of West Virginia’s law school, taught law at Yale, led the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, sat on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and founded a law firm that today ranks among Washington’s largest and most prestigious.

About his character:

Arnold was something of a loose cannon whose native intelligence covered a certain sloppiness. Waller correctly points this out in Arnold’s legal scholarship, but it pervaded his entire career.

About the merits of Waller’s biography:

Waller’s discussion of the end of Arnold’s career, when Arnold sometimes found himself on the conservative side of political issues, reflects a double standard. In the late 1960s, Arnold supported the Vietnam War and strongly opposed the tactics of civil disobedience used by some antiwar protestors. The author points out, correctly, that Arnold did not know much about foreign Waller does cite my own research on this matter in a footnote, but only to note that it casts Standard Oil in a somewhat better light. policy—but the same could have been said about his comments on business earlier in his career. Waller also dismisses some acidic letters Arnold directed at the American Civil Liberties Union and Ralph Nader as “snide” (p.194), a term not used to describe comparable broadsides against business in the 1930s and 1940. Despite these reservations, Spencer Weber Waller has done a major service. Arnold is an important figure, and this biography is a valuable guide to his career. If it is sometimes too partial to its subject, that is an error common among biographies. Those interested in the evolution of antitrust law, legal thought, civil liberties, and the history of American liberalism will find this volume useful.

Here’s the Amazon link. Wells is the author of Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World, which also discusses Thurman Arnold’s career and influence in some detail.

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