Laurence Hirsch Silberman was an American lawyer, diplomat, jurist, and government official. He served gallantly as a United States Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1985 until his death in 2022.
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Silberman was born on October 12, 1935 and passed away on October 2, 2022 at age 86, ten days to his 87th birthday.
Born to a Jewish family in York, Pennsylvania, Silberman graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in history in 1957.
He also served six months of active duty in the U.S. Army (five and a half years reserve) and attended the Harvard Law School, graduating in 1961 with a Bachelor of Laws degree.
Silberman worked in the private sector as a partner at the law firms Moore, Silberman & Schulze in Honolulu and Morrison & Foerster and Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C.
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He also served as Executive Vice President of Crocker National Bank in San Francisco.
In government, he worked as;
An attorney in the National Labor Relations Board’s appellate section,
- Solicitor of Labor from 1969 to 1970, and as
- Undersecretary of Labor from 1970 to 1973.
As Solicitor, Silberman was largely responsible for developing the requirement of goals and timetables as an enforcement device for the affirmative action order.
Later, he regretted his stance, writing, “Our use of numerical standards in pursuit of equal opportunity has led to the very quotas guaranteeing equal results that we initially wished to avoid.”
During the campaign for the 1980 presidential election, Silberman was co-chairman of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy advisors.
Then, from 1981 to 1985, he served as a member of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament and the Defense Policy Board.
In total, Silberman held six Senate-confirmed positions and never received a dissenting vote.
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