Justice Harold H. Greene Dead At 76

The federal judge who oversaw the 1984 breakup of AT&T and the author of two of the nation's most important civil rights laws is dead. U.S. District Court Judge Harold H. Greene, 76, died at his home in Washington on Saturday of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Greene will be forever linked to the largest anti-trust case in history. He supervised the consent decree that broke Ma Bell into seven regional operating companies, helping to spark the technological revolution that has transformed telecommunications.

Earlier, as a senior Justice Department attorney and key aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Greene drafted much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before being appointed to the federal court, he was chief judge of Washington's Superior Court.

According to CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen, Harold Greene could not have predicted what his work on the AT&T breakup was going to lead to. There are two reasons for this: First, the Internet, which wasn't on the scene in 1984 when Greene broke up Ma Bell, and second, the Telecom Act of 1996, which literally re-wrote the communications landscape.

Greene's tenure had a lot of highlights in addition to the AT&T case. He presided over litigation relating to the Iran-Contra Scandal in the mid-80's, and he ruled on dozens of cases affecting the federal government. Of course, a big reason for this is that he happened to sit on the bench in Washington D.C.

He was another of the old-line judges who didn't have an awful lot handed to him but instead reached out and took hold of his own career. He earned his law degree at night, worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and then spent thousands of hours, probably, managing the AT&T case, to make it go the way he wanted it to go.

Judge Greene is going to be known for the AT&T case, but it's a shame, really, says Cohen, because over the course of his 30 years and hundreds of other cases, he enormously affected the federal landscape in Washington and around the countr.