Ambassador C. Boyden Gray
Ambassador C. Boyden Gray founded Boyden Gray PLLC, a law and strategy firm in Washington, D.C. The firm builds on his distinguished career as a trusted advisor to presidents, legislators, regulators, and business leaders on matters of law, policy, and international affairs.
Creating huge, new unaccountable bureaucracies to issue massive regulations to correct the mistakes of other huge, unaccountable bureaucracies is not what the Framers had in mind when they imposed the separation of powers to limit government and guarantee free-market liberty for individuals.
– C. Boyden Gray
Gray served George H. W. Bush for twelve years in the White House, first as counsel to the Vice President during all eight years of the Reagan Administration, and then as White House Counsel for all four years of the Bush Administration.
During his White House tenure, Gray was closely involved with President Bush’s work on a variety of domestic issues, including drafting the Executive Order requiring White House review and cost-benefit analysis of regulations, steering the landmark Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the ground-breaking Americans with Disabilities Act, and overseeing the judicial selection process.
Gray later served as the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union from 2006 to 2007, and Special Envoy for European Affairs and Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy from 2008 to 2009. He received the Presidential Citizens Medal for his service.
Outside public service, Gray practiced law for 25 years at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale), starting in 1968. He served as a partner with the firm from 1973 to 1981, and from 1993 to 2005. His practice focused on regulatory matters, including environmental issues, biotechnology, trade, clean air, and risk management.
Gray also helped develop the Business Roundtable, serving as its first counsel, and helped create the Committee for Justice, a non-profit dedicated to screening judicial and other presidential nominees. He has served on several boards of directors or trustees, including for the Atlantic Council, FreedomWorks, Reason Foundation, The European Institute, and the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.
Gray was a generous supporter of educational causes, ranging from the Bishop Walker School for Boys, to the Gray professorships at the UNC Law School and the Harvard School of Public Health, to the battle for charter schools and school choice in Washington, DC. He was an adjunct professor at NYU Law School, and he founded the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
Gray was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1943. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was a regular contributor to the Crimson, and with high honors from the University of North Carolina Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the North Carolina Law Review. He clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren at the U.S. Supreme Court and served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves.