James McCauley Landis (September 25, 1899 – July 30, 1964) was an American academic, government official and legal adviser.
Biography
Landis was born in Tokyo, Japan, where his parents were teachers at a missionary school. He graduated from Princeton University and received a law degree and a doctorate in juridical science from the Harvard Law School, where he was a student of Felix Frankfurter. In 1925, Landis was a law clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court. He then became a professor at the Harvard Law School, until called into government service during the New Deal.
Landis served as a member of the Federal Trade Commission (1933-1934), as a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1934-1937), and as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1935-1937). While dean of the Harvard Law School from 1938 to 1946, Landis served as regional director of the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense (1941-1942) and then as its national director (1942-1943). President Franklin D. Roosevelt then sent him to Egypt as director of American Director of Economic Operations in the Middle East (1943-1945). In 1946, Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, later appointed him chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, a position he served until the next year. A friend of the Kennedy family for years, he served as a legal advisor to Joseph P. Kennedy and as Special Counsel to President John F. Kennedy. In 1960 he drafted the Landis Report to President-elect Kennedy, reexamining the federal regulatory commissions and recommending such reforms as strengthening the commissions' chairmen and streamlining their procedures, which the Kennedy administration adopted.
Sources
- Thomas McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, and Alfred Kahn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
- Donald A. Ritchie, James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)
Quotes
- "A statute rarely stands alone. Back of Minerva was the brain of Jove, and behind Venus the spume of the ocean," in "A Note on 'Statutory Interpretation,' " 43 Harvard Law Review 886, 891 (1930).
- "If anybody ever flied to the moon, the very next day Trippe will ask the Civil Aeronautics Board to authorize regular service."
Works
- 'The Business of the Supreme Court', by James M. Landis and Felix Frankfurter, (New York, 1928).
- 'The Administrative Process', by James M. Landis, (New Haven, 1938).
External links
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