biography
| name: |
Gesell, Gerhard (Alden)
|
pronunciation:
[guhzel]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1910–93)
|
| biography:
| Jurist, born in Los Angeles, California, USA, the brother of Arnold Gesell. He studied at Yale, then worked for several years as a government lawyer before joining a private Washington firm. He had been in private practice for 25 years when President Johnson appointed him a US district judge for Washington (1968). In 1971 he ruled that the Washington Post had a First Amendment right to publish the leaked government documents known as the ‘Pentagon Papers’. (In that famous case, first the New York Times and later The Post published documents that disclosed official misinformation regarding US policy in Vietnam.) His judgment was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court. |
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