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