The Washington, D.C., legal community lost a principled supporter of liberty this past weekend with the death of C. Boyden Gray at age 80. He was White House counsel to President George H. W. Bush in the 1990s, and instrumental in Bush’s selection of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.

Boyden cared about liberty just as much when he was outside government as when he was part of it. For over three decades, he was a major supporter of the Federalist Society and Freedom Works, as well as a trustee of the Reason Foundation. His generosity supported internships for aspiring free-market journalists who went on to write for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Hollywood studios.

Boyden loved to talk about ideas. During Covid, he recalled that his college thesis in the 1960s took a skeptical look at 19th-century efforts in Britain to implement the mandatory taking of vaccines. He also successfully fought attempts to expand overseas antitrust laws to U.S. companies when he was ambassador to the European Union from 2006 to 2008.

His work will live on at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he established the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. He once joked that the center should have had the word “Dismantling” in its name.