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American National Biography Online Sharp, Malcolm Pitman (20 Nov. 1897-12 Aug. 1980), lawyer and teacher, was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Frank Chapman Sharp, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, and Bertha Pitman, who for a time served as a city commissioner in Madison. Malcolm Sharp attended public schools in Madison. During his early years, he was also educated in the classics by his aunt, Anne M. Pitman, who taught Greek and Latin at the University of Wisconsin. Sharp graduated from Amherst College in 1918 and then served in 1918-1919 as a navy pilot and flight instructor. He returned to Madison and attended the University of Wisconsin, earning an M.A. in economics in 1920. Because of his earlier classical education, he was able in his senior year to teach Greek at Amherst, and in 1919-1920 he taught economics at the University of Wisconsin. He received his LL.B. (1923) and LL.D. (1927) in law from Harvard. In 1924 Sharp married Dorothy Reed Furbish, a librarian; the couple had two children. After receiving his LL.B. in 1923, Sharp practiced law on Wall Street and taught law at the University of Iowa for a year before joining the law faculty at Wisconsin. He was with educator Alexander Meiklejohn (president of Amherst when Sharp was an undergraduate) during the exciting years (1927-1932) of the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, where he had a joint appointment in the college and the law school. Sharp became deeply involved in the excitement of breaking new ground in undergraduate education through the design of the Experimental College, based on a thorough grounding in the humanities. Unfortunately, the college was phased out by 1933. Alexander Meiklejohn and his idealistic and valiant young colleagues (including Sharp) simply could not survive the combination of a depression economy, conservative state politics, and the opposition of a powerful group of traditionalists at the university. In the interim, Sharp also served as a consultant to Governor Philip La Follette (a childhood friend and the son of Senator "Fighting Bob" La Follette) of Wisconsin in his 1931 campaign and later in his administration. In 1933 Sharp accepted a position as professor of law at the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1965. During these years Sharp's political and economic positions became clearly defined. A colleague at Chicago, Harry Kalven, Jr., described Sharp as follows: "He is not only the university professor who teaches in a law school. He is the signer of petitions, the supporter of causes, the liberal who is independent. He is the quiet, stubborn, unselfrighteous champion of lost causes. . . . Yet in economic matters he is staunchly conservative" (University of Chicago Law Review 33, no. 2 [Winter 1966]: 194). Sharp worked on the steel code for the National Recovery Administration during 1933-1935. However, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1935 that led to the demise of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a blow to Sharp's hopes and those of the other young, forward-looking lawyers and economists to encourage industrial recovery and combat widespread unemployment by adopting more than 500 fair practice codes for various industries. Although the Supreme Court decision made the NRA ineffective, many of its provisions (such as the Wages and Hours Act passed in 1938) were reenacted in later legislation. Sharp returned to the navy during World War II, serving from 1942 to 1943. He also participated in contract renegotiations in the Army Ordnance Office in Chicago toward the end of the war. Following the war Sharp was drawn into the controversy surrounding the death sentence of accused atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. He had read the newspaper accounts of the case and at first saw no reason to question the verdict of guilty. When asked to represent a committee of eminent scholars at the University of Chicago who questioned the severity of the sentence, Sharp, the only lawyer in the group, read the record of the trial, which convinced him that there was reasonable doubt about the guilt of the Rosenbergs. Sharp traveled to New York to represent the Chicago group, where he was asked to join the Rosenberg defense team as an associate of defense counsel at the appeal stage of the trial (1953). The appeal was denied, and the Rosenbergs were executed, after which Sharp became trustee for their two sons. His book Was Justice Done?--The Rosenberg-Sobell Case (1956) and numerous articles on the subject continued examination of the case and its outcome. Following the Rosenbergs' execution, Sharp continued in his battle to preserve civil liberties. As a charter member of the National Lawyers Guild (1936) and first president of the Chicago chapter, he took on the presidency of the guild again for two terms beginning in 1954 to help in their eventually successful efforts to convince the Justice Department that the guild was not subversive and should therefore not be added to the U.S. attorney general's list of subversive organizations. He also worked tirelessly during the 1950s in the cause of a young and favorite student, George Anastaplo, in his highly publicized confrontation with the Character and Fitness Committee of the Illinois Bar Association over Anastaplo's refusal as a matter of principle to answer questions about possible Communist or Nazi associations. In 1961 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Anastaplo 5-4. The only consolation was the ringing dissent of Justice Hugo Black, a dissent that many consider one of the best opinions Black ever wrote. Along with these cases, Sharp championed the cause of Morton Sobell--a supposed member of the Rosenberg "spy ring"--working for his release from Alcatraz, which took place in 1962. His civil rights interests also extended to race issues; he was tireless in testifying as a friend of the court in law school desegregation cases in the South during the 1940s and 1950s. Sharp retired from the University of Chicago Law School in 1965, having taken only two years of his three-year extended-tenure arrangement, to accept a teaching position in the law school at the University of New Mexico. In 1970 he retired from UNM. In 1971-1972 he worked for the Albuquerque law firm of Lyon & Ottinger, which had been formed by former students of Sharp's at UNM. The firm specialized in legal matters involving the poor, and Sharp was admitted to the New Mexico bar by legislative act as a professional courtesy so that he could appear in court on litigation. In 1972 he was named professor and chair of the political science department at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. He said on more than one occasion in personal communications that his final years of teaching were in many ways the most satisfying, given the range of courses he taught--constitutional law to biochemical mysteries, problems in war and peace to a course on the nature of proof in philosophy and the law, the technicalities of business law and economics, and all kinds of public policy questions, past and present. In 1974 Sharp received from the Illinois Division of the American Civil Liberties Union its first annual Harry Kalven Freedom of Expression Award. He taught at Rosary until his death in a Chicago hospital. An education in the classics, training as an economist and lawyer, a devotion to teaching, and a hopeful view of life's possibilities--together with a love of paradox and a playful wit--helped Sharp to express his true nature and overcome disappointments along the way. In the process he made significant contributions in the fields of commercial and international law, civil liberties, and higher education. Bibliography Sharp authored or coauthored three books: Social Change and Labor Law, with Charles Gregory (1939), Contracts: Cases and Materials, with Fritz Kessler (1953), and Was Justice Done?: The Rosenberg-Sobell Case (1956). He also wrote numerous articles and book reviews for scholarly journals, including "Promissory Liability (Parts 1-2)," University of Chicago Law Review 7 (1939-1940): 211; "Aggression: A Study of Values and the Law," Ethics 57, no. 4, part 2 (1947): 1-39; "Graduated Unilateral Disarmament," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 17 (1961): 113-14; and "The Conservative Fellow Traveler," University of Chicago Law Review 30 (1963): 704-20. He was a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on a variety of subjects. Between 1941 and 1954 Sharp was a participant in more than twenty-five University of Chicago Round Tables on radio, also on a variety of subjects. Jonathan Sharp Citation: Jonathan Sharp. "Sharp, Malcolm Pitman"; http://www.anb.org/articles/11/11-01179.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Further information is available at http://www.anb.org.
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