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Charles Warren (1868–1954)

Charles Warren was a lawyer, legal scholar, and author. He wrote The Supreme Court in United States History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1923. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College in 1889 and received a masters degree from the Harvard Law School two years later. He also received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Columbia University in 1933. In 1894, he founded the Immigration Restriction League with fellow Harvard graduates, Prescott F. Hall and Robert DeCourcy Ward. The organization promoted the exclusion of so-called new immigrants because of their allegedly inferior "racial qualities." During the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Warren served as assistant attorney general from June 1914 to April 1918 and drafted the Espionage Act of 1917. He married Robert Woods Bliss’s sister, Annie Louise Bliss, on January 6, 1904; they resided first in Boston, Massachusetts, and, beginning in 1914, in Washington, D.C., at 1528 Eighteenth Street NW. They had no children. The Warrens established a fund at Harvard University to provide for a professional bibliographer dedicated to the American History holdings of the Harvard University Library and its long-term development, and a scholarship fund at the New England Conservatory of Music, where Charles Warren was a trustee. Charles Warren died in Washington, D.C., on August 16, 1954.


M. A. DeWolfe Howe, "Charles Warren," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 71 (October 1953–May 1957): 390–98.

"Noted Lawyer, Pultizer Prize Winner, Dies," The Washington Post, August 17, 1954.

L. H. Woolsey, "Charles Warren," The American Journal of International Law 49, no. 1 (January 1955): 50–54.