| Name |
Morris LAVINE [1] |
| Birth |
3 Oct 1896 |
, home on Lorraine St., Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USA  [2] |
- the 1900 census recorded a birth date of August 1896.
|
| Gender |
Male |
| Census |
6 Jun 1900 |
, Cleveland; Ward 33, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USA [3] |
- Enumerated in the household with Benjamin/Bernard (age 36) were his wife Celia (age 33), their children Rosie (age 9) and Morris (age 3). Benjamin/Bernard was a merchant of second hand goods, a roofing paper manufacturer and a rabbi. He spoke five languages fluently, i.e. English, German, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This census recorded that the parents of both Benjamin/Bernard and Celia were born in Minsk Province, which was in the current Belarus, then part of Russia.
- Role: Son
|
| Census |
17 Apr 1930 |
, East 29th St., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, USA [4] |
- Enumerated in the household with Celia (age 65), now widowed, was her son Morris (age 33), who was single. Morris was an independent writer. Celia declared that her spoken language was Yiddish.
- Role: Son
|
| Census |
13 Apr 1950 |
, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, USA [5] |
- Enumerated in the household of Morris Lavine (age 54) were his wife, Jean Walker (age 42) and their daughter Dollie (age 5). Morris was an attorney.
|
| Education |
"Morris Lavine attended Los Angeles High School, where he was president of the Civics Club. [6] |
- "Morris Lavine attended Los Angeles High School, where he was president of the Civics Club. He attended the University of California at Berkley, majoring in economics as an undergraduate, and graduated from its Boalt Hall School of Law in 1917, when he was 22 years old. While attending the University of California at Berkley, he was also a freelance news journalist, selling news stories by the inch about the agricultural genetics developments at the U.C. Berkley campus." (These notes from his daughter, Joan Lavine.)
- Role: Principal 2
|
 |
Morris Lavine Civics Club
Morris Lavine, President of the Civics Club, Los Angeles High School. |
| Education |
"Morris Lavine attended Los Angeles High School, where he was president of the Civics Club. [6] |
- "Morris Lavine attended Los Angeles High School, where he was president of the Civics Club. He attended the University of California at Berkley, majoring in economics as an undergraduate, and graduated from its Boalt Hall School of Law in 1917, when he was 22 years old. While attending the University of California at Berkley, he was also a freelance news journalist, selling news stories by the inch about the agricultural genetics developments at the U.C. Berkley campus." (These notes from his daughter, Joan Lavine.)
|
|
|
Morris Lavine Civics Club
Morris Lavine, President of the Civics Club, Los Angeles High School. |
| Biographical Note |
- The following is a biographical sketch about Morris Lavine (1896-1982), composed by Joan C. Lavine, daughter of Morris Lavine, 25 November 2002.
"Morris Lavine was born in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., in 1896, to parents who had immigrated to the United States from Russia during the 1880's. In 1905, when he was eight years old, his family (his father, mother, and an older sister, Rose), moved to Los Angeles, California, where he resided for the rest of his life.
"In 1941, Morris Lavine married Jean Walker. They had one daughter, Joan.
"In Los Angeles, after graduating from Los Angeles High School, he attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics as an undergraduate, and then attended the law school at the University of California, Boalt Hall, from which he graduated during the First World War at the age of 20. He passed a special California Bar examination given by the State of California Supreme Court Justices orally then, and joined the U.S. Navy as an enlisted officer.
"Morris Lavine supported himself in college and law school with news reporting jobs and sold news items by the inch primarily to the Christian Science Monitor. He focused on the developments in genetics and the development of hybrid plants, especially of the geneticist Luther Burbank. He also taught economics at U.C. Berkeley while attending law school.
"During his enlistment in the U.S. Navy, he was part of the Judicial Adjutant General Corps (JAG), the legal services arm of the U.S. Navy, where he gained his first experiences in the practicing criminal law by prosecuting or defending about 400 court martial cases.
"After he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy at the end of World War I, he returned to Los Angeles, and became a very well-known "front page" reporter for the Hearst Corporation's Los Angeles daily, The Los Angeles Examiner. He was assigned the Los Angeles area courts as his beat (his assignment), was Hearst Corporation's chief Los Angeles area investigative reporter, and also became its in-house counsel in dealing with defamation issues. He was heralded for having "captured" the infamous Clara Phillips, on going to Honduras with then Los Angeles County Sheriff.
"He was so skilled at getting scoops that many other reporters were very jealous of his accomplishments. On one occasion, he and the federal judge trying a jury trial of a case much in the news went into a jury room after a jury had rendered a verdict one evening, but it had not been announced yet. The judge and he found the ballots in the trash bin, looked at them, and he was able to write a scoop on the outcome and have the results published on the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner before the verdict was announced!
"For several years, during the 1930's, Morris Lavine became a professional script writer at the Metro-Goldwin-Mayer Studios. He was in charge of writing or re-writing all of the MGM film production law-oriented scenes to make them conform to standard American courtroom practice and to make them accurately reflect the American legal system. He wrote a novel called "The Hall of Justice" and a play based on it, which was made into a film at MGM. During the early 1930's, he also wrote an official biography of the Comedian Roscoe “Fattie” Arbuckle, based on on-going interviews with him. Fattie Arbuckle died suddenly while he was writing this biography. It is a project his daughter Joan Lavine intends to finish.
"During the late 1930's Morris Lavine went into the formal practice of law, located in Los Angeles, California. In his legal career, he argued 18 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, more than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He was considered the top United States constitutional law specialist in the Western part of the United States during the 20th century. During his daughter Joan's childhood, he went to Washington, D.C., almost every year to argue cases on behalf of petitioners he represented before the U.S. Supreme Court.
"In his law practice, he represented and/or defended such (in) famous people as "Rattlesnake" James Lisenba, Carl Chessman, Mickey Cohen, Jimmy Hoffa, the government of Mexico, Edward Zap (the inventor of the modern helicopter principle, folding plane wings, and the rudder on planes that controls up and down motion called the Zap flap), a defendant and co-counsel in the Frank Sinatra, Jr. kidnap case, Tomoya Kawakita. He represented the inventor of the airbag in automobiles, and funded its original research and development. On a WestLaw database computer search for reported appeals Morris Lavine handled throughout his career, it located 1,000 reported appeals, about 500 in the federal appellate system and about 500 in the State of California appellate system. These were predominantly criminal appeals. He significantly improved the legal rights of defendants in criminal cases to fair trials and fair treatment in the United States by his efforts.
"Recently, American newspapers have re-visited a famous post-World War II case Morris Lavine defended in which Tomoya Kawakita, a Japanese-American, was charged with treason for having been an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan. He ultimately secured a clemency order obtaining Kawakita's release, signed by President John F. Kennedy just before his death, and it may have been one of the last official acts of President Kennedy the day he was assassinated.
"He also handled significant civil appellate litigation which established the rights in California of patients to sue hospitals for medical malpractice, and to sue on res ipsa loquitor (the thing speaks for itself) principles in general in the California legal system. For instance, if a surgical instrument were left inside a patient after surgery, that liability exists "speaks for itself". He established techniques for initiating personal injury litigation with notice pleading, that did not require a plaintiff to describe exactly what had gone wrong in details and depending on information that only a defendant would know.
"Morris Lavine's office associate for about 15 years was attorney Welburn Mayock. Welburn Mayock had been the chief attorney to the National Democratic Party in the United States during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman presidential administrations. Mayock was Harry Truman's campaign manager for Truman's 1948 U.S. Presidential campaign. Just after the Eisenhower administration took office, it attempted to have Welburn Mayock indicted for alleged "campaign irregularities" in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. Morris Lavine represented Mayock: Mayock reported to this writer that when he told his story to the grand jury considering whether to indict him of how he funded the Truman campaign, the grand jury panel gave him a standing ovation and refused to indict him.
"He had enormous personal courage to take on very difficult cases and causes, and to handle them extremely well when on one else could or would do so. He was totally loyal to his clients, whether or not they could pay him. He represented people of all backgrounds."
|
| Name |
Morris Lavin [3] |
| Occupation |
, Los Angeles, California, USA [2] |
| "a trial and appellate lawyer. |
- "a trial and appellate lawyer. He appeared and argued at least 17 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Among the California Supreme Court Justices, he was known as "Due Process Lavine"." (these notes from his daughter, Joan Lavine).
|
| Death |
25 Nov 1982 |
, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, USA [7] |
| Burial |
, Beth Olam Section; Hollywood Forever Cemetery; Crypt 2774; 900 North Gower St., Hollywood (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County, California, USA [8] |
| Person ID |
I1210 |
Ancestral Trails |
| Last Modified |
13 Apr 2024 |
1896 - 1982 (86 years)