The late Rex E. Lee was a staunchly independent conservative legal scholar and successful solicitor general in the first four years of the Reagan administration.
Lee, an avid runner, was only 46 when in April 1981 he was chosen to become the nation's 37th solicitor general, two days after he had completed the Boston Marathon in 3 hours, 7 minutes, 29 seconds.In his new post, as the officer who represents the government before the Supreme Court, he soon displayed a firm sense of dual and sometimes conflicting responsibilities, demonstrating allegiance not only to the president who had appointed him but also to his own personal judgment of national interests.
In 1985, by which time that duality had brought friction with other administration officials, he said of it, "The positions taken by the solicitor general for years have carried a special weight with the Supreme Court because they are regarded as representing not merely the political views of the administration but the broad interests of the nation."
Lee, who had served in the Ford administration as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's civil division, at first appeared to be precisely the kind of lawyer the Reagan White House wanted for solicitor general.
As founder and dean of Brigham Young University's law school, he was certainly "learned in the law," as required by statute.
And as a scholar who had articulated conservative views in two studies of constitutional issues, he was in keeping with the administration's plans to reverse decades of social legislation and judicial decisions by going "all the way to the Supreme Court," as Attorney General William French Smith put it.
While sympathetic to the classical conservative concept of judicial restraint, Lee proceeded to act on fresh cases in the spirit of the new administration, with an astonishing rate of success.
He won a very high percentage of cases that he argued before the Supreme Court, including reversals in 27 of 29 cases that flowed to the justices in 1983 from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in California, considered the most liberal circuit in the country.
But although Lee long before his appointment had endorsed positions against school busing, abortion and affirmative action, and in favor of school prayer, White House political aides soon discovered that he was not automatically their man.
By his second year as solicitor general, he was complaining that administration officials were putting "enormous pressure" on him to carry their causes to the court and that they were moving "too far, too fast." He called the White House agenda "an albatross around my neck."
Of particular concern to him were a series of cases involving religion that were pushed up to the Supreme Court by William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division, especially one in which the city of Pawtucket, R.I., had sponsored an outdoor Nativity scene and another concerning authorized school prayer in Alabama.
The administration's position supporting the localities in both cases clashed with Lee's view of what was permitted by the First Amendment.
Lee resisted Reynolds' pressure to endorse the Reagan policies on religion in public life, and as a result was publicly attacked by some conservatives.
After venting his frustrations in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he was accused by James McClellan, a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms who was an editor of a legal journal called Benchmark, of "servile deference to recent judicial precedents."
In June 1985, after four years in office, Lee resigned. His pay was then $59,500 a year, and the immediate reason for his departure, he said in an interview, was that "I can't afford to send three kids to college and support four more on a government salary." But he added:
"There has been a notion that my job is to press the administration's policies at every turn and announce true conservative principles through the pages of my briefs. It is not. I'm the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general."
He then undertook private practice, in which he appeared before the Supreme Court 60 times.
But not long after leaving the government, he was found to have immunoblastic lymphoma, a kind of cancer. In 1987, while undergoing chemotherapy that had left him bald, he appeared at the court wearing a wig, at the suggestion of a friend, Justice Antonin Scalia.
Six years ago he was found to have another form of cancer, mycosis fungoides. And two years after that, doctors found that he had peripheral neuropathy, a painful nerve disease. The following year he was hospitalized for blood clots in a leg.
His response to the accumulation of setbacks was to joke, "I'll have you know there are five illnesses I don't have."
Lee, a devout Mormon, had become the founding dean of Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School in 1971 and was later credited by Scott Cameron, an associate dean, with having created the institution "out of nothing" and fostered its growth to the point where it "consistently ranks in the top 25 percent of all law schools in the U.S., because of him."
In 1989, the university chose him to be its 10th president, less than three decades after he had graduated as valedictorian there. With the effects of his illnesses mounting, he stepped down last December.
He died Monday at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo, his hometown. He was 61 and had been fighting various forms of cancer for 10 years.