Reuben Buck Robertson, III (1939-2000)

By Reuben Buck Robertson, III

from “Our Robertsons”

Copyright © 2023 Victoria Robertson

One of the prerogatives of authoring a family history is that you get to write about yourself in the first person singular.

I was born on September 24, 1939, in Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio. After attending the Asheville School in Asheville, North Carolina, I graduated with a B.A. degree in 1961 from Yale University, where I studied American history, literature and economics, played soccer, was a member of St. Anthony Hall, Delta Psi, and served as president of the Inter-Fraternity Council. I attended Yale Law School, from which I received my J.D. degree in 1964, and the London School of Economics in London, England.

In 1966, I settled in Washington, D.C., where I entered law practice as an associate attorney with Covington & Burling, a large law firm primarily representing corporate and industrial clients. In early 1968, I resigned that position to become a member of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign staff, which ended suddenly with his assassination in June 1968. I had just gotten married and heard the news from a ticker tape in a London hotel. We decided to extend the honeymoon by several weeks, since I no longer had a job waiting for me at home, and we explored various parts of Europe.

When we finally did return to Washington, I joined the US Department of Transportation to develop and prosecute, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, a series of lawsuits attacking unlawful racial discrimination in employment on interstate highway construction programs. The cases were successfully settled shortly after they were filed, and thereafter, I was asked to stay on as a special counsel in the Federal Highway Administration. In that position I helped develop and implement the federal motor vehicle safety and highway safety enforcement programs.

In 1969, with a new administration coming into power, I decided to pursue a longstanding concern about unresponsive and counterproductive government activities and became one of the early “public interest” lawyers challenging substantive and procedural practices of federal and state regulatory agencies. I helped consumer advocate Ralph Nader establish the Center for Study of Responsive Law, which sponsored teams of young lawyers and law students—nicknamed “Nader’s Raiders” by the press—in studies of various agency activities and a variety of public interest litigation efforts. In 1972, I founded the Aviation Consumer Action Project to advocate consumer interests in safe and affordable air transportation, and the chairman of the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) appointed me to head a special committee to advise that agency on consumer interests. I also served on a special advisory committee to address needed reforms of the CAB’s regulatory procedures, which published a detailed report and recommendations for simplifying the administrative rules and procedures of the agency. In 1974, I became senior attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group.

As a public interest lawyer during the early 1970s, I became a strong advocate for complete economic deregulation of the airline industry and enhancing the benefits of competitive market forces in air transportation. I worked for passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1976, which phased out the CAB after a transition period— making it the first major federal regulatory agency to be completely abolished. After its enactment, and as the deregulation act began to take effect, I was asked in 1978 by the newly-appointed chairman of the CAB, Dr. Alfred E. Kahn, to become a senior official in the agency to help plan and implement the orderly transition to deregulation and “sunset” of the CAB. Accepting that challenge, I became director of the CAB’s Bureau of Consumer Protection and headed its antitrust and law enforcement programs for two years.

In 1980, I was appointed by President Carter as Chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States and was confirmed in that position by the US Senate. I resigned the following year to resume private law practice. I have been a full-time Washington lawyer since then, specializing in commercial litigation and regulatory matters.

On June 1, 1968, I married Victoria Hadley Emery in New York, New York. She was born on February 9, 1947, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Virginia Jessie Hadley and Harold Andrew Emery. Victoria studied at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, from which she received her B.A. degree in political science in 1969. In 1976, she was awarded a M.A. degree in anthropology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. A professional archeologist, Victoria is employed by Parsons Engineering Science, working on artifacts from colonial and prehistoric American Indian sites. Victoria and I have four daughters and live in Washington, D.C.

In August 1994, the family visited Walls, Shetland, for several days. They saw Seafield in Walls, the home of my great-great-grandfather Thomas Robertson, and met some of our Robertsons who live in Shetland, including Angus and Lauretta Robertson, Eleanor Robertson Hall, and Martha (“Pat”) Robertson.