George W. Liebmann

George W. Liebmann is a Baltimore lawyer and historian and a native New Yorker. He was born on June 20, 1939; his father, William B. Liebmann, was the proprietor of the Chaucer Head Book Shop, long located at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, regarded as Manhattan leading ‘carriage trade; bookseller; he subsequently served from 1963 to 1972 as Curator of the Herbert Lehman Suite at Columbia University, one of the largest collections of its type aside from the presidential libraries. 
George Liebmann attended a variety of schools, public and private, concluding at the Riverdale Country School in New York. He then went to Dartmouth College, graduating with high distinction in government, and then to the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a Managing Editor of the Law review. He then moved to Baltimore to be Law clerk to the then Chief Judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, Frederick Brune (best known as the author of the 1958 Report of the Council of Chief Justices criticizing several Warren Court Supreme Court decisions). After brief service as an enlisted reservist in the Army and as an inactive law officer in Judge Advocate General's Corps, U.S. Navy, he joined a Baltimore law firm. 
During the period 1968-1972, he was involved in four major national political controversies. He was the organizer and secretary of the Coalition Against the Supersonic Transport, which was successful in its purpose.[i] As an Assistant Attorney General of Maryland and counsel to its Department of Social Services, he successfully argued in the Supreme Court the case of Dandridge v. Williams, which effectively brought an end to efforts to constitutionalize welfare rights. He organized the defense by State Attorneys General of cases attacking the constitutionality of school financing systems; his brief on behalf of 34 state governments was cited in both the majority and dissenting opinions in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez in which the Supreme Court warded off federal constitutional attacks on such systems. Shortly thereafter, he wrote a series of influential articles in the American Bar Association Journal,[ii] the Business Lawyer and other publications opposing extensive expansions of the federal criminal code proposed by both the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations; these opposition efforts were ultimately successful. 
His private practice at various times involved constitutional and appellate litigation, private antitrust litigation, and real estate, environmental and bankruptcy law. He has served as a federal bankruptcy trustee since 1981.
In 1980-81, he served as Executive Assistant to Harry Hughes of Maryland and was the principal draftsman of legislation regulating land use around the Chesapeake Bay.[iii] He unsuccessfully warned the Governor of the impending Maryland savings and loan crisis.[iv]
In 1981, he started his own law practice, Liebmann and Shively, P.A. He served as Chairman of Governor's Commissions on Medical Malpractice and on Local Government Antitrust Liability and wrote extensively on land use and local government issues. In 1993, he was a Simon Industrial and Professional Fellow at the University of Manchester, and in 1996 first became a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, to which he has frequently returned. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for United States Senate in Maryland in 1998, securing newspaper endorsements but not the popular vote.[v] 
He is the author of four volumes of legal practice books found in almost all Maryland law libraries: Maryland District Court Law and Practice (1976) and Maryland Civil Practice Forms (1984), the latter has been periodically updated for 27 years. He is also the author of a trilogy of books on sub-local governments and their potential, including The Little Platoons (Praeger 1995)[vi]; The Gallows in the Grove (Praeger 1997) and Solving Problems Without Large Government (Praeger 2000)[vii], reprinted as Neighborhood Futures (Transaction Books, 2002). He is also the author of three books of biographical sketches, Six Lost Leaders (Lexington Books, 2002); The Common Law Tradition: A Collective Portrait of Five Legal Scholars (Transaction Books, 2004)[viii]; and Diplomacy Between the Wars: Five Diplomats and the Shaping of the Modern World (I.B.Tauris and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)[ix]; as well as of The Last American Diplomat: John D. Negroponte and His Times, 1960-2010 (I.B.Tauris and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)[x], The Fall of the House of Speyer: The Story of a Banking Dynasty (I.B.Tauris, 2015)[xi]; America’s Political Inventors: The Lost Art of Legislation (Bloomsbury 2019)[xii]; and Vox Clamantis In Deserto: An Iconoclast Looks At Four Failed Administrations (Amazon 2021)[xiii]. 
Since 2001 he has been the volunteer executive director of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research, a state-level think tank,[xiv] and editor of a compendium of its papers, The Trimmer's Almanac: Ten Years of the Calvert Institute (2007)and of Prohibition in Maryland: A Collection of Documents (2008). He has been President of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar from 1975-77 and since 2006[xv], a Life Member of the American Law Institute, and a Permanent Member of the Federal Judicial Conference for the Fourth Circuit.
Category:American lawyers
Category:American historians