LARAMIE - On the campus where he once lectured law students, New Deal trust buster Thurman Arnold was honored Friday as "the decathlon champion of American law."

Spencer Weber Waller, director of the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies at Loyola University's Chicago School of Law, said the Laramie native's wide-ranging talents invite comparison with the athletic contest that combines 10 different track and field events.

Waller, author of the recently published "Thurman Arnold: a Biography," said he became interested in his subject's career while working as a lawyer in the Justice Department's antitrust division, which Arnold headed for more than five years during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

Speaking to students and others at the University of Wyoming College of Law, Waller said that as a lawyer, Arnold "tried to look at and study and talk about the law in action, not the law on the books."

He was interested, the speaker said, in "how the law reflected power."

Arnold was born in Laramie in 1891, the grandson of a Presbyterian missionary and son of a prosperous lawyer. As a teenager, he worked at least one summer as a horse wrangler on an area ranch.

After graduation from Princeton and Harvard Law School, and service in World War I, he practiced law in Chicago before returning to Laramie. He was elected to the state Legislature as a Democrat, served as mayor of Laramie and was invited to lecture at the fledgling UW law school.

He then became dean of the West Virginia law school and taught law at Yale.

He said in his autobiography that in 1938 he eagerly joined Roosevelt's "anti-monopoly crusade" against "the cold-blooded murder of small business."

"He moved the world," Waller said of Arnold. "He created a culture of competition in this country that lasts today."

As America approached entry into World War II, Arnold focused on agreements between American and European, primarily German, companies to divide the world market, which he thought "bordered on treason."

As he prepared to sue the Union Pacific Railroad for anticompetitive practices, however, Roosevelt was preparing to nominate UP kingpin Averell Harriman as ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Thurman then found himself in a new position, having been "fired actually," Waller said, and made a judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

He did not find the judicial life to his liking, and in 1945 he joined Abe Fortas and Paul Porter in forming the Washington law firm of Arnold, Fortas and Porter.

During the 1950s, the firm represented corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, Federated Department Stores and The Associated Press. At the same time, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., was rising to power with assaults on what he portrayed as the internal threat of communism. Arnold, Fortas and Porter represented a number of government employees discharged for alleged disloyalty.

"Through the 1950s, up to about 45 percent of their time went to representing hundreds of not important people, secretaries, file clerks, people that really were no threat to national security," Waller said. "It took incredible courage in that era."

The UW College of Law, Phi Beta Kappa and the American Heritage Center sponsored Waller's appearance as the 2006 Maxfield Family Distinguished Speaker. Peter Maxfield, counsel to Gov. Dave Freudenthal, and his banker brother, Tom, were in the audience.

Star-Tribune correspondent W. Dale Nelson can be reached at {M3wdnelson@bresnan.net.