Frances Beverly Biddle served as U.S. attorney general from 1941 to 1945. Biddle, who also briefly served as a federal appeals court judge, gained international prominence as a U.S. judge at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. However, Biddle also is remembered for his role in interning persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast during World War II.

Biddle was born on May 9, 1886, in Paris, France. He graduated from Harvard in 1909 and earned a bachelor of laws degree from Harvard in 1911. Following graduation from law school, Biddle served one year as the private secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes, then serving as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Holmes, one of the towering figures in American law, was a remarkable figure. Later in life, Biddle published Mr. Justice Holmes (1946), a memoir of the year spent with the jurist.

Biddle moved to Philadelphia in 1912 and...