Philip S. Anderson of Williams & Anderson PLC (Retired) has died at age 88. He was elected to the ALI in 1975 and to ALI Council in 1982. Anderson was a founding partner of Williams & Anderson, retiring in 2019. His practice areas included business litigation, media law, and corporate law.
Below is an excerpt from his Ruebel Funeral Home obituary:
He was born May 9, 1935, in Little Rock, to Philip Sidney Anderson, Sr. and Frances Walt Anderson. In 1942, at age seven, he moved with his family to a secret government installation that became the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee; his father was an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, which designed and built the town. He later moved to Marked Tree, Arkansas, and spent his last year of high school touring the country with his prize-winning Future Farmers of America speech,?Cotton: The Benevolent Monster. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville in 1959.?
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While at the University of Arkansas, he was Grand Master of Xi Chapter of Kappa Sigma fraternity, editor-in-chief of the 1956?Razorback?yearbook, a political cartoonist for the campus newspaper and magazine and co-editor of?The?Razor Blade: Arkansas’ Sharpest Magazine,?a popular underground publication that got shut down by the university after five issues.?He was editor-in-chief of the?Arkansas Law Review. After law school, he served as a Captain with the United States Army Reserve in the Adjutant General Corps.
Anderson practiced law in Little Rock for nearly 60 years-- first with his father-in-law, Edward L. Wright, at the firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, and then at Williams & Anderson, the firm he founded with W. Jack Williams in 1988. Anderson was active throughout his career in the American Bar Association, serving in the House of Delegates for 30 years, as Chairman of the House of Delegates from 1992-1994 and in 1998-1999 as President of the American Bar Association, only the third Arkansan to hold that position. He was a member of the American Law Institute and served on its governing Council for three decades. He was presented with the Outstanding Service Award by the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation in 2013 and was inducted into the inaugural class of the Arkansas Bar Association Legal Hall of Fame in 2022.?
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He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the Grolier Club of New York. He served as a trustee of the George W. Donaghey Foundation for 44 years; was a member of the board of directors of WEHCO Media, Inc; a trustee of the Central Arkansas Library System; and a devoted member of XV for four decades. He was a congregant of Trinity Episcopal Church, where he served two terms on the Vestry.
On January 18, 2024, a Minute in Remembrance was read at a meeting of the ALI Council by former ALI President Roberta Cooper Ramo of Modrall Sperling. Her remarks are available here.