Judge Harold H. Greene, the U.S. District Court Judge who presided over the 1984 break-up of American Telephone & Telegraph Co., died Jan. 29 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
"Judge Greene more than any one single individual was responsible for launching the new era in telecommunications that we enjoy today. Without his courage and great intellect, we all might today still be limited to leasing our phones from AT&T," Samuel A. Simon, chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based consumer trade association Telecommunications Research and Action Center, said in a statement released over the weekend.
The antitrust case against AT&T was one of the first cases assigned to Greene after he was nominated to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by President Jimmy Carter. After almost a year, dozens of lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice and AT&T battled it out in a series of motions before Greene. He submitted opinions, but never decided the case on it merits because the combating parties eventually reached their own settlement. The resulting consent decree broke AT&T into smaller regional providers, now known as the BOCs. The agreement also allowed consumers to choose their own long distance company and purchase their own phones, instead of renting them for perpetuity.
In previously published interviews, Greene said he "didn't dream up the break up of AT&T." But in hindsight, he believe the case "came out better than I expected" and provided "great benefit to American businesses, to the economy and to American life in general, because it brought competition to the telecommunications industry," the Washington Post, reported.
"Besides being a brilliant jurist, he was a sensitive and fair person," says Cindy Schonhaut, executive vice president of government and external affairs at ICG Communications Inc. Schonhaut was a juror in Greene's court for a cocaine possession trial in the 1990s and had the opportunity to sit in on some of the oral arguments in AT&T antitrust trial as an FCC staffer.
Greene, who stopped hearing cases in 1998, is also renown for his role in creating civil rights legislation as a lawyer with the Justice Department in the 1960s. There he was an aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and played an integral role in writing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
