Archibald Cox Jr. was born on May 17, 1912 in Plainfield, N.J. The oldest of seven children, Cox attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H.

He studied economics and American history at Harvard and attended HLS, graduating magna cum laude in 1937.

Cox’s father, Archibald Cox, was a patent lawyer, and his mother’s grandfather, William M. Evarts, defended President Andrew Johnson during impeachment proceedings in 1868, according to Ken Gormley’s 1997 biography, Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation.

Cox began his own legal career as a law clerk to New York appellate court Judge Learned Hand. He then spent three years as an associate at the Boston law firm Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge and Rugg.

In 1941, four years before he would become a lecturer at HLS, Cox joined the National Defense Mediation Board in Washington, D.C. He would later serve as associate solicitor in the Department of Labor.

Cox, who sported a crew-cut hairstyle and thin bowties, was revered for his dedication as an HLS professor. Some students found his classroom presence uninspiring, but Heymann, who took a labor law class from Cox, said he was “purposefully uncharismatic.”

“He never wanted the attention to be on him as a person,” Heymann said. “He wanted it to be on the job he had to do or the labor law he was teaching.”

Heymann said Cox never went out of his way to be a “showman,” not even with the high-profile Watergate proceedings.

“In a relaxed way he was very aware of his responsibilities,” Heymann said. In fact, Heymann said, Cox brought the examinations from his HLS class along with him to Washington to grade while he conducted his investigation.

Cox left HLS several times to fill government posts, but he always returned.

During President Harry S. Truman’s administration, Cox headed the Wage Stabilization Board for a time but quit when Truman rejected a restricted wage increase proposal.

He led the “Cambridge Group,” an association of professors who advised John F. Kennedy on political issues when Kennedy was a Mass. senator considering a run for the presidency.

When Kennedy was elected to that office in 1960, he appointed Cox to be solicitor general, the third highest position in the Department of Justice and the chief advocate of the U.S. government before the Supreme Court.

As solicitor general, Heymann said, Cox argued “more very important constitutional law cases than anyone in the second half of the 20th century.”

“He wrote the voting rights statute, which sort of created equal voting rights in the United States; he argued Buckley v. Valeo, which set the rules for campaign finance,” said Heymann.