Prominent conservative attorney Ted Olson, who advocated for the Bush recount and gay marriage cases, dies

Former Attorney General Ted Olson, who served two Republican presidents as one of the country’s best-known conservative lawyers and successfully advocated for same-sex marriage, died Wednesday. He was 84.

The law firm Gibson Dunn, where Olson had worked since 1965, announced his death on its website. No cause of death was given.

Olson has been at the center of some of the biggest cases of recent decades, including a victory on behalf of George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election recount dispute in Florida, which went before the Supreme Court.

“Even in a city full of lawyers, Ted’s career as a trial attorney was exceptionally fruitful,” said Mitch McConnell, the longtime Senate Republican leader. “More importantly, I count myself among the many in Washington who knew Ted as a good and decent man.”

Bush appointed Olson as his attorney general, a position the attorney held from 2001 to 2004. Olson had previously served at the Justice Department as an assistant attorney general during President Ronald Reagan’s first term in the early 1980s.

According to Gibson Dunn, Olson has argued 65 cases before the Supreme Court during his career.

“These weren’t just small cases,” said Theodore Boutrous, a partner at the law firm who worked with Olson for 37 years. “Many of them were big, blockbuster cases that helped shape our society.”

That included Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commissiona 2010 case that struck down many restrictions on political donations, and a successful challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

“He is the best lawyer I have ever worked with or seen in action,” said Boutrous, who worked so closely with Olson that they were known to Gibson Dunn as “the two Teds.” “He was an entertaining and powerful lawyer who could take on the Supreme Court justices in a way that few lawyers could. They respected him enormously.”

One of Olson’s most prominent cases put him at odds with many fellow conservatives. After California passed a ban on same-sex marriage in 2008, Olson joined forces with former opponent David Boies, who had represented Democrat Al Gore in the presidential election, to represent California couples seeking the right to marry.

During closing arguments, Olson argued that tradition or fear of harm to heterosexual unions were legally insufficient grounds to discriminate against same-sex couples.

“It is the right of individuals, not a permissiveness granted by the state,” Olson said. “The right to marry, to choose to marry, is never linked to procreation.”

A federal judge in California ruled in 2010 that the state’s ban was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2013.

“This is the most important thing I’ve ever done, as a lawyer or as a person,” Olson later said in a documentary about the marriage case.

He told The Associated Press in 2014 that the marriage case was important because it involves “tens of thousands of people in California, but really millions of people in the United States and around the world.”

His decision to join the cause added a prominent conservative voice to rapidly changing views on same-sex marriage across the country.

Boies remembered Olson as a giant in legal circles who “left the law, our country and each of us better than he found us.” Few people are heroes to those who know them well. Ted was a hero to those who knew him best.”

Olson’s personal life also tragically intersected with the nation’s history when his third wife, noted conservative legal analyst Barbara Olson, died on September 11, 2001. She was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

In recent years, the likes of quarterback Tom Brady during the 2016 “Deflategate” scandal and tech company Apple have been in a legal battle with the FBI over unlocking the phone of a gunman who killed fourteen people in San Bernardino, California. in 2015.

The reach of his career and his stature on the national stage were unprecedented, said Barbara Becker, managing partner of Gibson Dunn.

“Ted was a titan of the legal profession and one of the most extraordinary and eloquent advocates of our time,” Becker said in a statement.

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