Andrew D. Orrick
Class of 1947

Partner, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe

Regional Administrator, United States Securities & Exchange Commission

Andrew Downey Orrick was a member of a prominent San Francisco family of lawyers and a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Orrick spent his legal career with the firm now called Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, founded in 1885. His father, William Orrick, headed the firm, and a brother, also named William, was a federal judge who died in 2003.

Downey Orrick graduated from Yale in 1940 and served in the Army during World War II, reaching the rank of captain. He attended UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco after the war and joined the law firm in 1947.

Active in Republican politics, he was San Francisco chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower in 1952, during Dwight Eisenhower’s first run for president, and a decade later was Northern California chairman of Richard Nixon’s unsuccessful campaign for governor of California.

Mr. Orrick became regional administrator of the SEC in San Francisco in December 1954 and was appointed to the commission by Eisenhower five months later. He was renominated to a new term in 1957, spent a brief period as acting chairman and served until 1960.

He then returned to the law firm but made a moral choice to get out of the field of securities law, one of the firm’s specialties, said his nephew, attorney William Orrick III.

Mr. Orrick remained with the firm and was a partner when he retired in the late 1970s. Mr. Orrick, known as Downey, died Sunday at his San Francisco home. He was 90.