Paul Bender

Paul Bender was an American constitutional lawyer, teacher and public servant whose career stretched from clerkships with Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter to the United States Solicitor General's office and the deanship of Arizona State University's law school. Born on 31 May 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, to Edward and Betty Okun Bender, he died in Phoenix, Arizona, on 11 September 2026 at the age of 93.

He grew up in Brooklyn and attended James Madison High School, where he was a classmate of the future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. At Harvard College he graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1954, then earned a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1957. At Harvard he met Margaret Thomas, whom he married in 1955. Their marriage lasted seventy years, until her death not long before his own. They had two sons, John Felix, born in 1965, and Matthew Learned, born in 1967, names that quietly echoed the judges who shaped his early professional life.

After law school Bender clerked for Judge Learned Hand on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (1958 to 1959) and then for Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court (1959 Term). He joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty in 1960, rising to full professor in 1966 and remaining there for twenty-four years. In 1965 and 1966 he also served as an assistant to Solicitor General Archibald Cox. From 1968 to 1970 he was general counsel to the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

In 1984 he became the fourth dean of what is now the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, serving until 1989. At ASU he helped establish the Indian Legal Program, later widely regarded as one of the strongest in the country, and he pushed to diversify the student body. After his deanship he continued to teach United States and Arizona constitutional law and to write on constitutional law, intellectual property and Indian law, co-authoring the casebook Political and Civil Rights in the United States.

From 1993 to 1997, during the Clinton administration, Bender served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General under Drew S. Days III. In that role he argued major cases before the Supreme Court, among them Farmer v. Brennan, United States v. National Treasury Employees Union, United States v. Virginia (the Virginia Military Institute admissions case), United States v. Winstar Corp., and Bush v. Vera. He later recalled United States v. Virginia, argued while Ginsburg sat on the Court that decided it, as his favourite argument of all time. Over his career he argued more than twenty cases before the Court and remained a familiar media voice on constitutional questions, especially on Arizona PBS's Horizon.

In Arizona he also sat on tribal appellate courts, including the Hopi Tribe's Court of Appeals, and served as chief justice of the Fort McDowell Nation Supreme Court and of the San Carlos Apache Court of Appeals. Family and colleagues remembered his support for Native American art and for the dialogue that helped lead to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Away from the courtroom he was a lifelong pianist, a sometime banjo player, and a tennis and squash enthusiast who shared those games with his children.

ASU Law announced his death in mid-September 2026, remembering a scholar who had shaped the college and a generation of students. He was survived by his son Matthew. Donations in his memory were suggested to the Arizona Humane Society or to local public media including KAET and KJZZ.