Word: amsterdamers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tony Amsterdam is 30. Toiling 20 hours a day, he spends 40% of his time teaching criminal law at Penn, most of the rest traveling around the country trying civil rights cases for which he gets no fee. Last month he hit New Orleans to argue his umpteenth case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He next surfaced in Washington, advising the White House Conference on Civil Rights...
...necessity, Amsterdam has learned to work 72 hours without sleep. Last summer he drove across the U.S. with out stopping to rest- twice. He is a part-time poet, playwright and novelist; he is equally versed in poker, tennis, two foreign languages (French, Span ish), and he has mastered the arts of advocacy from the Supreme Court to the police courts of Mississippi. "He is," says one federal judge, "the most dazzling person I have ever met in my entire life...
...tall, intense, totally organized son of a prosperous Philadelphia lawyer, Amsterdam graduated from Haverford College summa cum laude in 1957, determined "to learn everything in the world." He pursued a graduate degree in art history at Bryn Mawr while he went to Penn law school, stood No. 1 in his class, edited the law review and sharpened the "void for vagueness" doctrine (meaning failure to specify an offense) that has since invalidated many an unjust Southern...
Astounding Memory. In 1960, Jus tice Felix Frankfurter chose Amsterdam as his Supreme Court law clerk, the only non-Harvard man Frankfurter ever picked. It was a meeting of two omnivorous minds. "He was a man committed to the breadth of life," recalls Amsterdam, who edited Frankfurter's unpublished memoirs. "We got along marvelously...
...after a frenetic year as a U.S. prosecutor in Washington, Amsterdam joined the Penn law faculty and started moonlighting as a top tactician for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund. In case after case he has astounded judges with his ability to remember hundreds of citations going back to the birth of the Republic. At one hearing, when the judge could not find one of Amsterdam's citations, an unruffled Amsterdam suggested: "Your Honor, your book must be misbound." It was. In New Orleans last winter, he flipped through the apparently hopeless appeal of a Mississippi Negro accused of possessing...