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.

"[Griswold] was one of the giants of the American legal education and the American legal profession," said the present Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark.

"He was a person of tremendous integrity and knowledge and, as such, was a premier model of what a lawyer should be for generations of law students and lawyers across the country, and around the world."

Griswold received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Oberlin College and then went on to Harvard Law School, serving as president of the Harvard Law Review from 1927 to 1928. He graduated summa cum laude and first in his class in 1928 and received the S.J.D. in 1929.

Griswold also holds 32 honorary degrees, most notably from Harvard in 1953 and Oxford University in 1964.

After a brief stint as a private lawyer following his graduation, Griswold became an attorney with the Solicitor General's office. He quickly rose to the position of Special Assistant to the Attorney General.

Griswold left Washington, D.C. for Cambridge in 1934 to serve as an assistant professor at the Law School. He held that post for only one year before gaining the Charles Stebbins Fairfield Professorship. Griswold received the Langdell Professorship in 1950 and retained it until he took Emeritus status upon retirement.

President Johnson, a Democrat, called the Republican Griswold in 1967 asking him to return to the U.S. Solicitor General's Office--this time as its head.

Griswold accepted and continued to serve under President Richard M. Nixon. He finally retired more than six years and 100 Supreme Court cases later.

"It's very hard to get used to the idea that he's not active anymore," said Vorenburg.

A Celebrated Career

Griswold remained active in the legal profession, serving as a partner at the D.C. law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue since 1973.

He spent much of his 65-year legal career concerned with federal taxation, authoring "Spendthrift Trusts" in 1936 and editing "Cases on Conflict of Laws," among numerous other publications.

Even as an assistant attorney fresh out of law school, Griswold distinguished himself while arguing complicated tax cases before the Supreme Court.

Griswold served as President of the Association of American Law Schools in 1957 and 1958, and of the American Bar Foundation from 1971 to 1974.

He also stood as a trustee of the Harvard Law Review Association and was honorary chairman of the Campaign for Harvard Law School, the School's current fundraising effort.

The American Bar Association awarded him the ABA Gold Medal in 1978, its highest award, for conspicuous service to the legal profession and the cause of justice in the U.S.

In honor of his contributions, the Law School dedicated Griswold Hall in 1979, which houses the Dean's office, faculty offices and a classroom.

He leaves his wife, Harriet Allena; a son, William E. Griswold of Belmont; a daughter, Hope E. Murrow of Cambridge; a brother, James Griswold of Exeter, N.H.; a sister, Hope Curfman of Denver; and five grand-children.

The funeral will be private. A memorial service will be held at a later date