Theodore Olson, who argued 65 cases at the Supreme Court as President George W. Bush's solicitor general and as a private lawyer and who served in President Ronald Reagan's Department of Justice, died at 84 after suffering a massive stroke, NPR reports. Olson's face and voice broke into the public consciousness in 2000 when he argued and won Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that delivered the presidency to George W. Bush. Overcoming objections to his appointment as solicitor general, on the grounds that he was too partisan, Olson persevered in the post even after his wife Barbara, herself a conservative firebrand, was on the hijacked plane that went down on 9/11 at the Pentagon. As solicitor general, he strongly defended many of the Bush Administration's anti-terrorism policies. But on more than one occasion he warned administration officials, including the president himself, that some of those policies would not pass constitutional muster at the Supreme Court. His warnings proved prophetic in two cases, one involving the indefinite imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay of a U.S. citizen without access to a lawyer, and in the other, torture guidelines, subsequently withdrawn, that permitted extreme methods of interrogation.
Olson had previously served in the Justice Department as an assistant attorney general during Reagan’s first term in the early 1980s. Most of Olson's legal life, however, was as a private lawyer, where, among other things, he championed the cause of corporations large and small. He was a rock star at the conservative Federalist Society. But he was also unpredictable. He championed the cause of the so-called "dreamers," winning a case that allowed 700,000 people brought to the U.S. when they were children, to remain in the U.S. legally. Even more prominent was his battle to strike down laws banning gay marriage. After California adopted a ban on same-sex marriage in 2008, Olson joined forces with former adversary David Boies, who had represented Democrat Al Gore in the presidential election case, to represent California couples seeking the right to marry, the Associated Press reported. During closing arguments, Olson contended that tradition or fears of harm to heterosexual unions were legally insufficient grounds to discriminate against same-sex couples. “It is the right of individuals, not an indulgence to be dispensed by the state,” Olson said. “The right to marry, to choose to marry, has never been tied to procreation.” A federal judge in California ruled in 2010 that the state’s ban violated the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court let that decision stand in 2013. “This is the most important thing I’ve ever done, as an attorney or a person,” Olson later said in a documentary film about the marriage case.