Former Dean of Harvard Law School and U.S. Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold, one of the most profoundly important figures in American law, died on Saturday at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 90.

Griswold was a dominating figure on the Harvard Law School faculty for 33 years, 21 of them as dean.

"This whole place was his creation," said Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence Charles Fried.

He left the Law School in 1967 to assume the post of U.S. Solicitor General, a position in which he went on to argue more cases before the Supreme Court than any other man in his lifetime.

Shaping the Law School

"Erwin Griswold can be a brusque, even abrasive man," an editorial in The Harvard Crimson said in 1967, following the announcement of his retirement. "And it sometimes surprises those who meet and work with him that he is a good man and a very great dean of Harvard Law School."

Leading the Law School toward his vision of internationalization, Griswold doubled the size of the faculty without changing the size of the student body. He was responsible for the development of the Law School's International Legal Studies Program and the International Tax Program.

Griswold firmly believed in the necessity of applying legal concepts to current concerns.

"If the Harvard Law School, through its faculty activity and teaching, could shift its concern from the narrow objectives of much traditional legal scholarship, we might increase our contribution," Griswold said in 1967 at the 150th anniversary of the Law School in what many consider to be his greatest speech.

"I don't know how to start assessing what he meant to the Law School and the law," Former Dean of the Law School James Vorenburg said. "He was bigger than life."

At a time when American liberties were under attack from sexists, racists and McCarthyites alike, Griswold often stood alone as a champion of civil rights.

When the Law School admitted its first women students in 1950, Griswold oversaw and initiated the transformation. In fact, he lived to see one of those first female students--Ruth Bader Ginsberg--take her place on the Supreme Court.

When anti-Communist hysteria reached its peak under McCarthy's one-man Senate committee, Griswold appeared on Edward R. Murrow's well-known television program "See It Now" and denounced the "corruptive investigating practices of headline-seeking Congressional committees."

And when Blacks faced seemingly insurmountable segregation in Southern schools, Griswold served as an expert witness in several of the cases used to lay the foundation for the Supreme Court's desegregation order in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Griswold also served on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Presidents John F. Kennedy '40 and Lyndon B. Johnson.