Estate Find

The

Eleanor Custis Wright

and

Charles Alan Wright

Collection

Photograph

John Robert Brown

We offer a framed photograph of Judge John Robert Brown (1909-1993) with an inscription reading “To Charles A. Wright, fellow - laborer, planter, tiller in the Vineyard of the Law, with Professional Admiration and Great Affection, John Robert Brown U.S.C.T 1964”.

As seen in the photographs, there is a water stain along the lower margin with no affect on the inscription.

Wright was an active litigator before the U.S. Supreme Court. Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once described Wright as "a Colossus standing at the summit of our profession." A former student teasingly suggested the diminutive Ginsburg was actually referring to Wright's 6-3 height. The politically liberal Ginsburg also referred to Wright, a Republican, as "the quintessential friend." By the end of his life, Wright was on a first-name basis with all nine justices.

After Charles Alan Wright’s passing in 2000, 948 boxes of his papers were donated by the family to the Tarlton Law Library at The University of Texas at Austin. The recently acquired Wright Collection of letters and photographs from Presidents and United States Supreme Court Justices held the most personal significance to Charles Alan Wright and were retained from the donations to the Tarlton Law Library.

Provenance

Eleanor Custis Wright (1924-2023)

Custis, as she was known, was born on November 5, 1924 in Baltimore MD to Dr. Edwin Nash Broyles and Eleanor Custis Whiteley Broyles. She attended The Calvert School, Bryn Mawr School, Miss Hall's, and graduated from Vassar College in 1946.

Custis lived in Minneapolis MN with her first husband, Angus W. Clarke Jr. That was where, after divorce, she met Charles Alan Wright. Charlie moved to Austin in 1955 when he accepted a teaching offer from the University of Texas Law School, and he and Custis married later that year. They were married for 45 years until Charlie's death in 2000. This "Lady Baltimore" became a proud adopted Texan, and embraced all things Austin.

After moving to Austin at the age of 31, Custis learned to play golf at the Austin Country Club (ACC) from the acclaimed Harvey Penick. This started a passion for golf that lasted until she played for the last time, just shy of 97 years old. She played in many tournaments both in Texas and around the country, was on the Trans National Board as well as on the USGA Women's Mid-Am Committee. She was ACC Club Champion in 1980 (Senior Champion that year as well) and runner up in the Austin City Championship. She was President of the ACC Women's Golf Association, as well as of the Austin City Women's Golf Association. Custis had seven holes-in-one. She shot her age for the first time at 79 and numerous times thereafter. She was named "Sportsman of the Year" at the Austin Country Club in 2013 (the first woman to be named to that), and was delighted that the WGA created the "Custis Cup" to be played annually at her birthday.

In addition to her many golf volunteer positions, Custis served as art curator and archivist of UT's Tarlton Law Library, on the Texas Council of the Humanities, on the Advisory Council of the Harry Ransom Center, the Texas Historical Records Advisory Board, and helped organize Ann Richards' political papers.

A major part of Custis's life was supporting Charlie in his many professional and extracurricular activities, including extensive travel. She accompanied him on every business trip (except when he was in Washington working on Watergate, as she was very opposed to Nixon). Several times her husband accepted visiting teacher positions at law schools around the country, and she packed up her family of seven to make the move. She particularly enjoyed Charlie's teaching stints in England, first at Canterbury and then a number of times at Cambridge, where she was a member of the Cambridge Ramblers, as well as a golfer on many of Britain's famous courses. After Charlie's death, Custis continued to travel extensively with UT's Flying Longhorns as well as other friends and her children and grandchildren.

Charles Alan Wright (1927-2000)

Charles Alan Wright was an American constitutional lawyer widely considered to be the foremost authority in the United States on constitutional law and federal procedure, and was the coauthor of the 54-volume treatise, “Federal Practice and Procedure” with Arthur R. Miller and Kenneth W. Graham, Jr., among others. He also served as a special legal consultant to President Richard Nixon during the congressional investigations into the Watergate break in and coverup, and for a time was the president's lead lawyer.

The following is an excerpt of “In Memoriam: Charles Alan Wright”. This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting of Professors Douglas Laycock (chair), Roy Mersky, and L. A. (Scot) Powe. 2000.

Mr. Wright . . . was something of a child prodigy, and so the long career of Professor Wright got off to a very early start. Born in Philadelphia on September 3, 1927, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1947 and from Yale Law School in 1949, clerked for Judge Charles E. Clark on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and assumed his duties as assistant professor of law at the University of Minnesota in 1950, just before his twenty-third birthday. He was promoted to associate professor in 1953. He joined the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin in 1955, at the age of twenty-seven. Professor Wright was a popular and successful teacher, teaching large sections of Constitutional Law and Federal Courts year after year.

Mr. Wright studied under the mid-century legal realists at Yale, and the best of legal realism is apparent throughout his life's work. A more momentous formative experience came in his clerkship with Judge Clark, who had been the reporter and chief draftsman for the original Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, and who continued to serve actively in the rulemaking process until 1955. During that clerkship in 1949-50, Mr. Wright and Judge Clark coauthored Mr. Wright's first article on procedure. The origins of Professor Wright's greatest work - a lifelong study of legal practice in the federal courts, principally organized around the various sets of federal rules - lie in this apprenticeship with Judge Clark.

Professor Wright's reputation rested first and foremost on his monumental treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure. This is the one indispensable reference work on procedure and jurisdiction in the federal courts. Begun in 1969, by the time of Professor Wright's death it had grown to 57 large volumes, with second and third editions of many volumes and frequent supplements to all the volumes. He recruited a team of distinguished coauthors; the volumes are variously credited to Wright; Wright & Miller; Wright, Miller, & Kane; Wright, Miller, & Cooper; Wright, Miller, & Marcus; Wright & Gold; Wright & Graham. Professor Wright was the one author common to all volumes, the leader and organizer of the whole project.

The treatise has been cited more than 50,000 times in on-line texts, periodicals, and judicial decisions. This remarkable set of books is but one of the more than 250 entries in Professor Wright's bibliography.

Professor Wright's reputation also rested in part on his fame as a Supreme Court advocate. He personally argued thirteen cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, including a remarkable series of nine cases from 1968 to 1973. He won ten of the thirteen cases outright, won half his point in another, and lived to see his position substantially vindicated in the two cases he lost.

Professor Wright's most famous and most difficult client was President Richard M. Nixon. Professor Wright represented the President on constitutional issues growing out of the Watergate investigations by Congress and the special prosecutor. For a time he clearly appeared to be the President's lead lawyer, but then there was a shuffling of responsibilities, and he did not argue the case in the Supreme Court. It seems clear that his client lied to him, and it seems equally clear that Professor Wright could not have saved the Nixon Presidency even if he had been given full control of the case. Professor Wright steadfastly refused to comment on his representation of the former President, resisting the temptation to clarify his own role at the expense of a client's confidences. Of all the many things he did in his extraordinarily full life, representing President Nixon was the one thing most visible to the non-legal public, and it became the centerpiece of many of his obituaries.

Another large piece of Professor Wright's work was his service to The American Law Institute, a select organization of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars that produces independent studies and summaries of American law. Professor Wright was elected to the Institute in 1958, when he was only thirty. From 1963 to 1969, he served as reporter for the Institute's massive Study of the Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts. At the conclusion of that project, he was elected to the Council, the small group that reviews every draft document before its submission to the membership.

For the last seven years of his life, he served as president of the Institute.

Professor Wright served for nearly 30 years, under appointments from three different Chief Justices, on various committees to propose revisions of the federal rules of procedure or the statutes granting jurisdiction to the federal courts. He was a frequent speaker at the circuit conferences of federal judges; some federal judges described him as their coach. He served eight years on the permanent committee to supervise the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, seven years on the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution, ten years on the Committee on Infractions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (five years as chair), and two years as chair of the NCAA Administrative Review Panel.