By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 13, 2007

Victor H. "Vic" Kramer, 93, an antitrust attorney who turned his back on a notable career with a Washington law firm to devote himself to public interest law and education, died Jan. 8 of acute respiratory failure at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was a resident of the District.

Mr. Kramer had been a Justice Department attorney for nearly 20 years before joining Arnold, Fortas & Porter (now Arnold and Porter) in 1957. A quintessential establishment lawyer, supremely capable and fearsomely confident, he shocked the local legal community when he decided to leave the firm in 1970 for public interest law.

"People who know about such things say that if you ever had to count Washington's antitrust lawyers on the fingers of one hand, you'd include Vic Kramer," Joseph Goulden wrote in "The Superlawyers" (1972), quoting a colleague's reaction to Mr. Kramer's departure. "Well, he took a year's leave to help found the Center for Law and Social Policy, a public-interest firm, and then sent word to Arnold and Porter that he wasn't returning; finished, just like that, tossing over a $200,000-a-year partnership and casting his lot with those . . . kids who are always yakking about consumerism and berating Washington lawyers. . . ."

In his memoir and in a later interview, Mr. Kramer said he left because corporate law practice "did not inspire me with a sense of accomplishment."

With Charles Halpern, he co-founded the Center for Law and Social Policy and became the first director of the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University. Except for service as special counsel to the Senate Select Ethics Committee (1977-78) and as counsel to then-U.S. Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti (1980-81), he devoted the remainder of his legal career to teaching and to providing legal assistance to low-income people and others who found it difficult to obtain legal representation.

Victor Horsley Kramer was born in Cincinnati to parents who were accomplished in their own right. His father, Simon Pendleton Kramer, was one of the first neurosurgeons in the United States, and his mother, Minnie Halle, came from a prominent Jewish family that owned one of the first modern department stores in the Midwest.

Mr. Kramer graduated from Choate preparatory school, received an undergraduate degree in government, with honors, from Harvard University in 1935 and earned a law degree from Yale Law School in 1938.

Joining the Justice Department shortly after, he started as a trial lawyer and then became chief of the litigation section in the Antitrust Division. During World War II, he served in the Navy.

In almost two decades at Justice -- where he was one of "Uncle Sam's trustbusters," in the words of The Washington Post -- Mr. Kramer tried and won four major antitrust cases and argued and won two appeals in the Supreme Court. (He argued another case before the Supreme Court in 1978, on behalf of a client of the Institute for Public Representation.)

He left the Justice Department in 1957. After a year in solo practice, he joined Arnold, Fortas & Porter, where, as senior partner, his clients included the Coca-Cola Co., Ford Motor Co. and Major League Baseball. In the famous case known as Flood v. Kuhn, he helped to successfully defend baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and Major League Baseball in the suit by St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood to throw out baseball's reserve clause as a violation of federal antitrust laws.

Although Flood was defeated in the Supreme Court, his challenge to the reserve clause ultimately changed the financial structure of baseball.

In 1976, Mr. Kramer became a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where he taught antitrust law and legal ethics. The next year, he was appointed special counsel to the Senate Select Ethics Committee in its investigation to determine whether any senators had been involved in "Koreagate," alleged influence-peddling on Capitol Hill by the South Korean government. He left Georgetown in 1981 to teach at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he remained a professor of law until his retirement in 1994.

He was the author of numerous law review articles on antitrust and legal ethics issues and the editor of several book-length publications. He also wrote personal memoirs and the history of the Kramer family from its arrival in the United States in 1833 to 1938.

Disciplined and demanding, Mr. Kramer inspired awe, if not fear, among friends, colleagues and family members, even as they realized that he held himself to the same exacting standards as he held others.

"He was a small man in stature, but he filled a room," recalled his son-in-law Kawin Wilairat.

As the senior partner at Arnold & Porter responsible for recruitment, Mr. Kramer's method of interviewing prospective employees was short, if something less than sweet. "You have exactly five minutes to tell me why we should take you," he would say, pulling out his pocket watch.

He detested sloppy work from his students, and his cardinal rule was that personal pronouns had no place in legal briefs, ever.

Family dinner-table conversations "were more often akin to legal interrogations," Wilairat recalled. As the consummate trial lawyer, he rarely posed a question -- to children, in-laws, grandchildren -- if he didn't already know the answer.

"For the uninitiated, this could be unnerving," Wilairat said, also noting that his father-in-law believed in spending time with his family just as strongly as he believed in high standards of conduct.

Mr. Kramer was one of the early members of the Jewish Reform congregation Temple Sinai, founded in 1951. In retirement, he devoted a considerable amount of time to volunteer work and established the Victor H. Kramer Foundation to finance and support research and scholarship at the law schools of the University of Chicago, Harvard University and Yale University.

His first wife, Miriam Tickton Kramer, died in 1965.

Survivors include his wife of 40 years, Solveig Grett Kramer of the District; three children from his first marriage, Ruth Ziony of Los Angeles, Edith Wilairat of the District and Stephen Kramer of New York; two stepdaughters from the second marriage, Kristin Kelly of Los Angeles and Carolyn Wolfe of San Diego; a brother, S. Paul Kramer of the District; and six grandchildren.