John Oller | |
---|---|
Born | Huron, Ohio, U.S. |
Occupation | Author; attorney (retired) |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Education | Ohio State University (BA) Georgetown University (JD) |
Genre | History; Biography |
Notable works | White Shoe (2019) The Swamp Fox (2016) |
Website | |
www |
John Oller is an American biographer, historian, and former Wall Street attorney. [1] [2]
Oller was born in Huron, Ohio. He earned a B.A. in journalism, graduating summa cum laude from Ohio State University in 1979, where he wrote for and edited the daily student newspaper, the Lantern , and interned as a reporter at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the Rochester Times-Union . Oller graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1982. [3] [4]
Following law school, Oller became an associate and later a partner in the litigation department of white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York City, where he represented Major League Baseball, including in the George Brett Pine Tar Incident as well as the Pete Rose sports betting case, as described in the Dowd Report . As a partner in the firm, he went on to specialize in complex commercial and securities litigation, and was a principal author of the Audit Committee Report for Cendant Corporation (at the time, the most massive fraud in American corporate history); the New York Times called the report a definitive case study in the area of accounting irregularities and fraud. In 2004, he authored a history of the Willkie firm. Oller retired from legal practice in 2011 to focus on writing. [4]
Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew is a biography of American actress Jean Arthur. [5] [2]
One Firm – A Short History of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, 1888 – is a history of the firm at which Oller was a law partner. [4]
An All-American Murder is about the 1975 murder of 14-year-old Christie Lynn Mullins in Columbus, Ohio, a case that went unsolved for 40 years. [6] Oller, a student at Ohio State University in Columbus when the murder occurred, began investigating the case in 2013. [6] He had just finished writing American Queen, and stumbled into the cold case on a website for amateur unsolved-homicide sleuths as he was looking for a new writing project. [6] In 2015 the Columbus police department credited Oller with tracking down the information that solved the case; after a renewed investigation, the police concluded that Mullins was murdered by Henry Newell Jr., who had died of cancer in September 2013, at age 63. [6]
American Queen: The Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague: Civil War "Belle of the North" and Gilded Age Woman of Scandal is a biography of Washington political hostess Kate Chase. [7]
The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution is a biography of American guerrilla warrior Francis Marion. [8]
White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century [9] is a history of the American white-shoe firm. [1]
Rogues' Gallery: The Birth of Modern Policing and Organized Crime in Gilded Age New York is a history of crime and policing in New York City from approximately 1870 to 1910. [10]
Gangster Hunters: How Hoover's G-Men Vanquished America's Deadliest Public Enemies [11] is the story of the early FBI agents who brought down John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and other 1930s criminals. [12]
A golfer, Oller won Willkie Farr & Gallagher's annual golf tournament in Florida a record four times. [4]
Wendell Lewis Willkie was an American lawyer, corporate executive and the 1940 Republican nominee for president. Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican field's only interventionist: although the U.S. remained neutral prior to Pearl Harbor, he favored greater U.S. involvement in World War II to support Britain and other Allies. His Democratic opponent, incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, won the 1940 election with about 55% of the popular vote and took the electoral college vote by a wide margin.
Brigadier General Francis Marion, also known as the "Swamp Fox", was an American military officer, planter, and politician who served during the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. During the American Revolution, Marion supported the Patriot cause and enlisted in the Continental Army, fighting against British forces in the Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War from 1780 to 1781.
Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP is an American white-shoe law firm headquartered in New York City. The firm has additional offices in London and Washington, D.C.
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP is an American multinational law firm headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1879 by Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell, the firm advised on the creation of Edison General Electric and the formation of U.S. Steel, pioneered modern reorganization efforts for insolvent companies, and influenced key financial and regulatory practices.
The Lantern is an independent daily newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, published by students at Ohio State University. It is one of the largest campus newspapers in the United States, reaching a circulation of 15,000.
In the United States, white-shoe firm is a term used to describe prestigious professional services firms that have been traditionally associated with the upper-class elite who graduated from Ivy League colleges. The term comes from white buckskin derby shoes (bucks), once the style among the men of the upper class. The term is most often used to describe leading old-line Wall Street law firms and financial institutions, as well as accounting firms that are over a century old, typically in New York City and Boston.
Francis Lynde Stetson was an American lawyer. He was president of the New York State Bar Association in 1909 and of the New York City Bar Association from 1910 to 1911.
Norman C. Bay is an American attorney. He is the former United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico. Bay was the first Chinese-American United States Attorney. Bay is the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He is currently a partner at the law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
Thomas Lee Dillon was an American serial killer who shot and killed at least five men in southeastern Ohio, beginning April 1, 1989 and continuing until April 1992. He was nicknamed "Killer" for boasting about shooting hundreds of animals.
Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, commonly known as Willkie, is a white-shoe, international law firm headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1888, the firm specializes in corporate practice and employs approximately 1200 lawyers in 15 offices across six countries.
Dickson Minto is a Scottish law firm.
William Butler Hornblower was a New York jurist who served on the New York Court of Appeals. He was unsuccessfully nominated to the United States Supreme Court by President Grover Cleveland in 1893.
Paul Drennan Cravath was a prominent American corporate lawyer and presiding partner of the New York law firm known today as Cravath, Swaine & Moore. At the firm, he devised and implemented the Cravath System, which has come to define the structure and practice of most large American firms.
Andrew W. Needham is an American tax lawyer who is a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He joined the law firm as a lateral partner in 2005 from Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Needham was among the Cravath partners who advised Johnson & Johnson in its 2011 purchase of Synthes, Inc. for $21.3 billion, then the largest acquisition by Johnson & Johnson in its history.
Benito Romano was the first Puerto Rican to hold a United States Attorney's post in New York on an interim basis.
The Cravath System is a set of business management principles first developed at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Louis Aloysius Craco Jr. was an American lawyer. At the time of his death, he was the youngest president of the New York City Bar Association and a life member of the American Law Institute. He was a partner with the law firm Willkie, Farr & Gallagher and, later, Craco & Ellsworth. He was a co-founder of the Volunteers of Legal Service (VOLS) of New York City - organization providing pro bono legal services to low income New Yorkers. In 2004 he was awarded a Gold medal from the New York State Bar Association for his numerous contributions to development of the profession.
Donald J. Weidner is Dean Emeritus and Alumni Centennial Professor at Florida State University College of Law. He served as dean from 1991 to 2016 and was one of the longest sitting law school deans in the U.S. He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. Dean Weidner is a leading scholar on partnerships, limited liability companies and fiduciary duties. In 2011, he was named one of nine Transformative Law Deans of the Last Decade by The Leiter Report.
The history of the American legal profession covers the work, training, and professional activities of lawyers from the colonial era to the present. Lawyers grew increasingly powerful in the colonial era as experts in the English common law, which was adopted by the colonies. By the 21st century, over one million practitioners in the United States held law degrees, and many others served the legal system as justices of the peace, paralegals, marshals, and other aides.
Christie Lynn Mullins was a 14-year-old girl who was abducted, raped, and murdered on August 23, 1975, in Columbus, Ohio. Jack Allen Carmen was originally charged with the crime, pleading guilty. Following revelations about a witness called Henry H. Newell Jr., Carmen was re-trialled and acquitted. Following a new police investigation, Newell, who was deceased, was revealed as the murderer in November 2015. Author John Oller, who covered the case in his 2014 book An All-American Murder, was credited with helping solve the case.