Memorial Service Live Stream:
Events
The Memorial Service will take place on Sunday, November 15, 2026, from 2:30PM ET at the Cosmos Club, located on 2121 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008. For those unable to attend the service in-person, you can participate remotely by viewing the live stream of the service (please scroll up to see the video).
Obituary
Irvin Bertram Nathan passed away on September 5 at home. Powered by a strong will from the moment he took his first breath, he was always a leader, a doer, a man-on-the-go. Quick-witted, fun, and funny, he was ever delighted to find a new audience for his vast storehouse of jokes.
Irv was a brilliant and tenacious lawyer, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, and a longtime Washingtonian who never stopped being a Baltimorean at heart. Short in stature but towering in energy, intellect, and humor, an author friend once inscribed a book to him, “To Irv, a man of wit and charm and Aristotelian logic. Or do I have you confused with Henny Youngman?”
Born in 1943 and raised in Baltimore, the son of Sol and Irene Nathan, longtime civil servants of limited means who gave their children everything that mattered. His modest Baltimore upbringing established several lifelong friendships with strivers, who, like he, relied on education and drive to achieve great personal and professional success.
He graduated from Baltimore City College high school in 1960, where he cut his teeth on the school’s award-winning student newspaper, The Collegian — good practice, it turned out, for a career spent making concise arguments without burying the lede. Decades later, City College inducted him into its Hall of Fame.
He went on to Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1964 with a degree in history and earning a Phi Beta Kappa key. His journalistic inclinations followed him to campus, where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, moonlighted as a sportscaster on the school radio station, and spent a summer as an intern at The Baltimore Sun. He and his wife, Judy Walter, later endowed the Sol and Irene Nathan Baltimore Scholarship in his parents’ names, supporting students in the Cummings Scholars program — indicative of his deep respect for education and desire to give back to the community he loved.
From Hopkins, he went to Columbia Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1967 having been an editor of the law review and winner of the school’s highest trial advocacy honor, the Jerome Michael Trial Advocacy Award. In 2018, Columbia recognized his achievements by naming him an outstanding alumnus.
After law school came a clerkship with Judge Simon E. Sobeloff of the Fourth Circuit, a year that shaped him profoundly. Earlier in his career, Sobeloff was U.S. Solicitor General during the pivotal Brown v. Board of Education litigation. Sobeloff, and later, DOJ colleague and mentor Phil Heymann, were the two people Irv said he respected most in his professional life; he considered each a “devoted family man” who built “a successful professional career, dedicating his life to the public interest while earning a decent living for his family.” Irv spent the rest of his life trying to do the same, becoming a deeply respected mentor to a cadre of lawyers who revered his legal acumen which he maintained without compromising his humanity and humor.
Arnold & Porter hired him as an associate in 1968, and he stayed connected to the firm for nearly forty years, rising to senior litigation partner and chairing the White Collar Defense practice. The firm was a good fit for Irv, pairing a premium on legal excellence with a deep tradition of pro bono service in the fight for social and moral justice. At A&P, he defended the Commissioner of Major League Baseball against an unhappy team owner, represented a major accounting firm through a wave of securities fraud cases, defended the CFO of a telecommunications company caught up in one of the largest financial scandals in the nation’s history, and represented cabinet officers and U.S. Senators in investigations that made headlines. He also lent his counsel directly to Capitol Hill, serving as Senior Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and as Special Minority Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Twice he stepped away from private practice for public service — first as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Carter administration, where he supervised the ABSCAM prosecutions that sent seven members of Congress to prison, and later as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration, effectively the top assistant to the Justice Department’s number two official. He liked to say that his fifty years as a lawyer split neatly into thirty-five in private practice and fifteen in public service. Irv was particularly drawn to public service because there, he felt, he was always wearing a “white hat.”
Retirement never quite took. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Baltimorean, brought him back to work as General Counsel of the House of Representatives, where he argued the landmark case establishing that senior White House officials could not simply ignore House subpoenas. Then, in 2011, Mayor Vincent Gray appointed him Attorney General for the District of Columbia — the last DC AG to be appointed rather than elected. Before accepting the appointment, Irv made it clear that his one and only responsibility would be to the people of the District and not as the personal attorney to the mayor.
As DC AG, he ran an office of 700 people, including 350 lawyers, overseeing every piece of civil litigation involving the city and the general counsels of its police, fire, public works, parks, and education departments. While there, he honored his late friend and colleague Chuck Ruff by establishing the Charles F. C. Ruff Fellowship, an innovative program to provide the District government with more legal assistance and promote public interest legal work funded jointly through the Office of the AG and various local law schools. When he finally retired for good in 2014, Mayor Gray called his tenure “a stellar job.”
Even then, “retired for good” turned out to be a relative term. Irv returned to Arnold & Porter as senior counsel in 2015, and in the years that followed took on work as an arbitrator and mediator.
One of Irv’s highest compliments was to call someone a “solid citizen,” a label that fit Irv himself. He served on the DC Board of Professional Responsibility and chaired the DC Bar’s Ethics Committee; he was a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers; he led the Council for Court Excellence and the Abramson Scholarship Foundation, chaired the board of Tzedek DC, which fights for the legal and financial rights of low-income District residents, and served as a board member for many organizations including the Anti-Defamation League of DC, American Jewish Congress, National Capital Region, and UDC Law School Foundation Board. One colleague called him simply “a giant for justice in DC and in our nation.” Along the way, he taught — as an adjunct at Georgetown Law, covering ethics, litigation practice, and DC law, and as a visiting professor at the University of San Diego and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Over 47 years of marriage to his wife, Judith A. Walter, they built an equal partnership based on mutual respect and love. He enthusiastically supported her throughout her career, her return to graduate school for a Ph.D. in her 60s, and in her various volunteer positions. His long and prestigious legal career never kept them from leading a rich and rewarding personal life together. He was an avid reader, a fierce tennis player, a mediocre but determined golfer who relished the camaraderie of his rounds on courses in the DC area and in his beloved Berkshires, and a traveler who, with Judy, visited more than fifty countries. He was, by every account, a man of action — funny, curious about everyone he met, and fiercely loyal to the people he loved. A stroke in April 2023 finally slowed the pace, but not the spirit; he remained, to the end, sui generis.
He is survived by his wife, Judith A. Walter; his sons, Daniel A. Nathan (Susan Taylor) and Jonathan E. Nathan (Melissa Nathan); his grandchildren, Benjamin and Zoë Nathan; and his sister, Marilyn Nathan (Wes Porter).
Gifts in memory of Irv may be made to the Sol and Irene Nathan Baltimore Scholarship at Johns Hopkins University, Tzedek DC, or the Abramson Scholarship Foundation.
https://secure.givelively.org/donate/tzedek-dc-inc
https://abramsonfoundation.org/get-involved/donate
If you have questions about the Sol and Irene Nathan Baltimore Scholarship at Johns Hopkins University, please reach out to Savannah Miller at savannah.miller@jhu.edu