1. Philip Benjamin Heymann was an American legal scholar and federal prosecutor who headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General during the Carter administration and was briefly Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration before he resigned over management and policy differences as well as perceived interference by the White House.
Philip Heymann was involved internationally in supporting the rule of law in criminal justice systems.
Philip Heymann was later James Bar Ames Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, where he began teaching in 1969.
Philip Heymann was a 1950 graduate of Pittsburgh's Shady Side Academy.
Philip Heymann then served two years in the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, reviewing security clearances.
Philip Heymann later received his JD degree from Harvard Law School, where he was third in his class and one of two case editors of the Harvard Law Review.
From 1961 to 1965 Philip Heymann practiced in the office of the Solicitor General of the United States under Archibald Cox.
Philip Heymann left the Solicitor General's office shortly after President Johnson accepted Cox's pro forma resignation at the end of the court's term in 1965.
In 1968 Philip Heymann helped Katzenbach force a reluctant State Department bureaucracy to finally undertake a review of the denial of security clearance of John Paton Davies, one of the China Hands whose security clearance was revoked 14 years before by then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who made the decision under pressure of Joseph McCarthy's allegations.
Philip Heymann left the State Department for Harvard Law School where he taught as visiting professor from July 1969.
Philip Heymann was one of the very few faculty hires by the law school who had a substantial amount of non-academic experience between graduation and appointment.
Philip Heymann believed that law students were better served by being taught how to build institutions rather than merely instructed in legal ideas.
At the beginning of his academic career Philip Heymann worked to introduce law students to some of the methods taught in the Kennedy School for creating and managing institutions.
Philip Heymann joined Cox and most of the Law School faculty, for instance, in an open letter to Congress, urging an end to the Vietnam war at the height of student unrest following the Kent State shootings.
Cox, unlike Philip Heymann refused to involve himself in the politics of the Supreme Court.
Philip Heymann collaborated with Cox in drafting the amicus curiae brief to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on behalf of the American Mutual Assurance Alliance and the American Insurance Association, in support of the constitutionality of Massachusetts's No-fault insurance scheme, a piece of legislation with a decided Harvard connection.
Philip Heymann was therefore versed in how to create, staff and run a large legal institution dealing with complex problems.
Journalist James Doyle who saw the daily workings of the special counsel's office as communications adviser to Cox and Leon Jaworski concluded that because Cox's own son broke the family tradition by not entering the legal profession and because Philip Heymann worked for Cox at the Solicitor General's Office and trained under him at Harvard Law School, Philip Heymann, his Harvard colleague, "was as close to Archibald Cox as a son".
Philip Heymann thought that Cox should not be perceived as "the one [who] kept the country from getting the story".
Since Cox had publicly committed to such a motion he decided to have Philip Heymann argue the motion in court to prevent damage to his own relations with the court.
Philip Heymann spent the rest of the summer working as Associate Special Counsel, returning to Cambridge to teach in the fall.
Philip Heymann was deeply pessimistic that Nixon would allow the prosecutors to continue.
Philip Heymann was Assistant Attorney General from 1978 to 1981 and Deputy Attorney General from 1993 to 1994.
Philip Heymann was co-chairman of the Constitution Project's bipartisan Sentencing Committee.
Philip Heymann was elected to the Common Cause National Governing Board in 1978 and 1998.
In 1954, Philip Heymann married the former Ann Ross of the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, and they had two children.
Philip Heymann's son, Stephen Heymann, is a former Assistant United States Attorney.
Philip Heymann died from complications of a stroke at his home in Los Angeles on November 30,2021, at the age of 89.