Mr. Olson has appeared before the Supreme Court more than 60 times. He opposed race-based job cuts at the federal level. procurement and university admissions, said the freedom of the press, and defended the young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers”. What many of his arguments had in common was that they aligned with his libertarian conservatism.

In 2000, the Republican Party tapped Mr. Olson to help Bush, then governor of Texas, in the legal battle following the hotly contested election to determine the 43rd president of the United States.

The battle began with a wild election night in which TV networks called the key state of Florida for Vice President Al Gore, then for Bush, and then declared the results yielded no results decisive. In the confusion, Gore conceded the race but quickly retracted that concession.

It didn’t matter Gore had won the national popular vote by 543,895 votes. Lawyers on both sides created war rooms to fight for Florida’s Electoral College votes, a number that would decide the presidency.

A recount ensues, with rancor partisan allegations of voter fraud, suppression, and deliberation over “hanging chads” on punch card ballots. When the state Supreme Court ordered a recount in all 67 counties across the state, the Bush team appealed, creating a Clash before the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Olson ultimately won his case. The U.S. Supreme Court first suspended the recount, then halted it altogether. The court ruled 5-4 that the recount violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution because Florida’s counties used different standards to determine whether ballots were valid. Florida put Bush ahead in electoral votes, 271 to 266, propelling him to the White House.

When Bush nominated Mr. Olson as solicitor general, the federal government’s top lawyer before the Supreme Court, the Senate confirmed him, by a vote of 51 to 47, despite fierce opposition from Democrats who said he was too policy for this position.

He did, however, gain strong support from Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal Democrat and Harvard law professor who represented Gore in the 2000 election campaign and who guaranteed that Mr. Olson would serve his role “with honor.” and distinction.” Another prominent liberal academic, Cass Sunstein, who had worked under Mr. Olson at the Justice Department in the early 1980s, called him “an impartial, independent person … not an ideologue at all.”

Mr. Olson was known for much of his public life as a deliberate workaholic who preferred to stay behind the scenes. But he gradually became a star of the sociopolitical and media scene in Washington, his notoriety being reinforced by the electoral victory of 2000 and his elevation to the post of solicitor general. Another factor was the notoriety of his third wife, Barbara Olson, a telegenic television commentator and author of books long hostile to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Barbara Olson died aboard the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, which was also Mr. Olson’s 61st birthday. She had called Mr. Olson moments before the impact, he later said, staying on the line long enough for them to express their love for each other.

Mr. Olson said he took care of his grief by immersing himself in his work.

“It’s very, very helpful to participate – as Barbara would have done and as Barbara would have wanted me to do – in any way possible to make our country safe again and find the people who did this,” said Mr. Olson at ABC. “Good Morning America” news program a few weeks after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York which cost the lives of nearly 3,000 people.

Mr. Olson reportedly warned Bush administration officials that some aspects of their efforts to expand executive powers would not be consistent with the Constitution. The Hamdi v. case Rumsfeld’s 2004 upheld the due process rights of detainees held as enemy combatants. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the plurality, said that “a state of war is not a blank check for the president.”

Mr. Olson successfully defended school vouchers, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, and the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 regulating political campaign financing. He called McCain-Feingold — named after its primary sponsors, Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin — a fitting response to “the relentless search for big contributions” that influence the political process through infusions of “sweet contributions”. money” donations to national parties.

He resigned in 2004 and returned to his partnership in the Washington office of Los Angeles-based Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

In 2010, he became lead counsel in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a landmark case that concerned election spending and free speech and challenged federal campaign finance restrictions that he had championed as solicitor general.

Mr. Olson represented Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group that produced a documentary film featuring a scathing assessment of Hillary Clinton as she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The group wanted to pay cable television companies to make the documentary available to viewers for free and sought to obtain a easing federal restrictions on corporate election campaigning.

“If dancing naked and burning the flag are protected by the First Amendment, why wouldn’t it protect robust speech about people running for office? Mr. Olson remarked to the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Olson helped persuade the court to overturn, in a 5-4 decision, parts of the campaign finance law that limited corporate and union spending on political advertising in the run-up to an election.

The ruling allowed corporations and other groups to devote unlimited funds to political campaigns.

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, Mr. Olson found himself increasingly at odds with the Republican Party. In 2019, he persuaded the Supreme Court to overturn the Trump Justice Department’s decision to end the program that protected from deportation about 700,000 young undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, who had been brought to the United States as children.

Mr. Olson said he considered his greatest legal legacy be its role in the invalidation of California’s Proposition 8, a referendum banning same-sex marriage that passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote after the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

He had come to the matter in a very unlikely way, through Rob Reiner, the director and liberal activist who was among those who intended to reverse the approved proposal.

Reiner had a very low opinion of Mr. Olson, because of what he saw as Bush’s ill-gotten victory in the 2000 election. But Mr. Olson told Reiner that he found Proposition 8 “wrong, morally and legally”, and Reiner was convinced that the lawyer could appeal to the conservatives.

“It is a conservative value to respect the relationship that people seek to have with each other, a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community, for our economy,” Mr. Olson later said to the Los Angeles Times. “I think conservatives should value that.”

Mr. Olson was taunted by former supporters of the far right, some of whom unleashed homophobic vitriol. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh denounced him on the radio. Others declined invitations to dine at his home near the Potomac River.

Mr. Olson also said gay rights advocates did not trust him because they feared challenging the ban in court could backfire and set the cause back for years. Some marriage equality supporters said they feared Mr. Olson would take the matter into his own hands. with the intention of launching it.

Partly to allay those suspicions, Mr. Olson asked David Boies, who had championed Gore’s cause in 2000, to take the marriage case with him. Olson told the Los Angeles Times that the case was not a partisan affair but rather a matter of “human rights, human decency and constitutional law.”

Mr. Olson delivered the opening statement on January 11, 2010 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“In California,” he said, “convicted murderers and child molesters enjoyed the freedom to marry,” he said. “What Proposition 8 does is characterize gay and lesbian people as different, inferior, unequal and disadvantaged. He tells gays and lesbians, “Your relationship is not the same. »… This stigmatizes them. He classifies them among the outcasts. This causes unnecessary and unrelenting pain, isolation and humiliation.

Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who heard the case without a jury, ultimately found that Proposition 8 violated the guarantee of equal protection under the law. Although the decision only had immediate effect in California was a major rallying point nationwide for gay rights advocates.

This victory paved the way for the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, who expanded marriage equality nationwide.

Theodore Bevry Olson was born in Chicago on September 11, 1940 and raised in Mountain View, California. His father was an engineer for United Airlines and his mother was a housewife and later an English and English teacher as second language.

In 1962, Mr. Olson earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and history from the University of the Pacific, where he developed an interest in law while serving on the debate team.

Mr. Olson enrolled in law school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was one of the few conservative students on campus. After graduating in 1965, he was hired by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and became an associate while developing a specialty in First Amendment law through cases involving clients such as NBC and the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Olson’s marriages to Karen Beatie and Jolie Bales ended in divorce.

After the death of his third wife, the former Barbara Bracher, he married Lady Booth, a Kentucky tax attorney and lifelong Democrat, in 2006. Besides his wife, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Booth once joked that marrying Mr. Olson gave her a purpose in life: “to find the liberal within Ted Olson.” Mr. Olson said he remained a conservative, despite his wife’s attempts.

“She’s working on me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s important to be surrounded by people who think differently from us. We don’t learn anything if we surround ourselves with people who think like us. »