Theodore Olson, prominent conservative US lawyer, dies at 84

By David Thomas

(Reuters) -Theodore Olson, a conservative American lawyer who helped Republican George W. Bush secure the presidency in the legal battle over the 2000 U.S. election and went on to argue successfully on behalf of same-sex marriage, died on Wednesday at age 84, his law firm said.

A constitutional lawyer who served as U.S. solicitor general under Bush and in the U.S. Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan, Olson argued 65 cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, his firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher said. The firm did not give a cause of death.

Olson spearheaded the lawsuit that challenged California's 2008 ban on gay marriage, also known as Proposition 8, alongside David Boies, his legal opponent who had argued for Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 election case at the Supreme Court.

Olson and Boies' lawsuit led to the high court in 2013 striking down part of a federal law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, and kept intact a district court ruling that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.

Boies and Olson later officiated at the 2014 wedding of their clients, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo.

Olson, a longtime member of the Federalist Society conservative legal group, represented Citizens United in the campaign finance lawsuit that led to a landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

He also represented Chevron in the oil company’s long-running legal battle over environmental claims in Ecuador.

More recently, he argued successfully before the Supreme Court in 2020 to block then-President Donald Trump’s bid to allow the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants - often called "Dreamers" - who entered the United States illegally as children.

"Ted has been the heart and soul of Gibson Dunn for six decades and made us who we are today," Gibson Dunn partner Theodore Boutrous Jr. said in a statement.

Olson's third wife, Barbara, a conservative legal analyst, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, killing everyone on board. Barbara Olson called her husband twice from the airplane after it was hijacked, according to the 9/11 Commission’s report.

This year, Olson supported a plea agreement reached in August between the U.S. government and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, and two of his accomplices. Olson criticized U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to revoke the plea deals, which would have spared Mohammed and the others a death penalty trial.

Olson married his fourth wife, tax attorney Lady Booth, in 2006 in a Napa Valley, California wedding that was attended by two Supreme Court justices, according to the Washington Post.

He was on a first-name basis with several Supreme Court justices. He and the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg regularly attended New Year’s Eve dinners at Ginsburg's Washington apartment.

(Reporting by David Thomas; editing by David Bario and Jonathan Oatis)