Edward H. Levi, Attorney General Credited With Restoring Order After Watergate, Dies at 88

Edward H. Levi, who began his association with the University of Chicago as a 5-year-old in a special kindergarten there and became the university's president before going on to be a widely admired attorney general of the United States, died yesterday at his home in Chicago. He was 88.

A distinguished legal educator, he was called upon to restore the credibility of the job of attorney general after the turmoil of the Nixon era.

No one was more a product of the University of Chicago than Mr. Levi. He remained at the university's laboratory school through grade school and high school, then attended college, graduate school and law school at the university. He was at various times a law professor, dean of the law school, university provost and, finally, the university's president.

As someone who spent most of his life in the shadow of the University of Chicago, Mr. Levi had enormous influence on the university, the study of law and even the surrounding Hyde Park neighborhood in which he grew up and which he later helped revitalize. He thrilled at teaching Chicago's renowned ''great books'' curriculum to undergraduates, pioneered the pairing of law with other disciplines like economics and statistics at the law school and fiercely recruited leading intellectuals in order to maintain the university as a vibrant agora of ideas.

But he secured a wider place in history for his role in Washington, where he demonstrated that the skills he had honed and deployed in academic circles were equally successful at the highest levels of government.

As the 71st attorney general of the United States, Mr. Levi won wide acclaim for his stewardship of the Justice Department in the post-Watergate era. He has been regularly cited by political scientists and lawyers as the model of a modern attorney general.

When he was named to the post in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, there was confusion about his political affiliations and philosophy. Some news accounts questioned whether he was best described as a conservative, liberal or libertarian. When he left office two years later, the answer was no clearer, but the question seemed mostly irrelevant.

Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who was a senior official under Mr. Levi in the Justice Department, said in an interview that ''there couldn't have been a tougher job in Washington where the whole executive branch was in disarray after Watergate.''

Justice Scalia said that as attorney general Mr. Levi ''brought the department through its worst years.''

He added, ''It was a bad time not only because of the disgrace of Watergate, which had affected the department most deeply, but there were also problems at the F.B.I.'' The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been conducting domestic surveillance operations, under the code name Cointelpro, that were probably unconstitutional. Mr. Levi forced through regulations setting limits on what the bureau and the Central Intelligence Agency could undertake in investigations.

''He brought two qualities to the job,'' Justice Scalia said, ''a rare intellectuality and a level of integrity such as there could never be any doubt about his honesty, forthrightness or truthfulness.''

Although he was appointed by a Republican president, Mr. Levi's performance was considered so nonpartisan that when he left the department to return to the University of Chicago, he was warmly praised by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

In a speech in the Senate on Jan. 25, 1977, Mr. Kennedy said, ''Mr. Levi entered office under the most difficult and trying circumstances, yet he leaves a department once again characterized by integrity, intellectual honesty and commitment to equal justice.''

Edward Hirsch Levi was born in Chicago on June 26, 1911, to Gerson B. Levi, a rabbi who came to the United States from Scotland, and Elsa Hirsch Levi. His maternal grandfather, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, was an early member of the University of Chicago faculty and a leading architect of the Reform branch of Judaism in America.

After graduating from college, Mr. Levi began studying for a doctorate in literature at the university but dropped out of the program. Years later he explained that he had been told in a friendly manner by a professor who admired his family that he would never be given a position in the humanities department at Chicago or any leading institution because he was a Jew.

He recalled that incident not ruefully but joyfully in an essay in Newsweek magazine during the nation's bicentennial celebrations of 1976 to demonstrate how much the country had changed. He had, after all, become the first Jewish dean of a major law school. When he became the president of the University of Chicago in 1968, he said he believed he was the first Jewish president of a major private university other than one with a clear Jewish identity, like Brandeis.

Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University and a former colleague of Mr. Levi's at the University of Chicago law school, said that it was Mr. Levi who came up with the idea of teaming with an economist to teach his course in antitrust law. It was from that innovation, Mr. Casper said, that the notion of tying law to other forms of study was born. ''This was the beginning of the 'law and economics school' of thought for which Chicago would become famous,'' he said.

Mr. Casper said that he often quotes Mr. Levi, who once told him that ''universities are the custodians not only of the many cultures of man but also of the rational process itself.''

Richard A. Posner, another law faculty colleague and now the chief judge of the federal appeals court based in Chicago, said that Mr. Levi's pairing of an economist and lawyer in teaching ''was a major development, not only in the law and economics sphere but in creating interdisciplinary studies in general at law schools.''

Judge Posner said that Mr. Levi followed the economics and law partnership by putting together a statistician and a law professor. A sociologist was added later.

In 1958, Mr. Levi founded the school's Journal of Law and Economics, which became a vehicle that helped the University of Chicago remain pre-eminent in the field.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and a former student of Mr. Levi's, said that he was also a model in furthering the notion that intellectual arguments should be about ideas, not personalities.

''He resented the personalizing of arguments,'' Mr. Botstein said. ''I remember he was asked if he was going to write his memoirs and he replied, 'If I were to write a book, it would be about ideas, not about myself.' ''

Mr. Levi was also renowned among college and university administrators for his deft handling of civil disturbances on the Chicago campus in 1968. Unlike administrators at some other major universities, he did not call in outside authorities when more than 400 students occupied his office for more than two weeks. He waited them out, and after they were gone he suspended and dismissed many of their leaders.

His slim volume, ''An Introduction to Legal Reasoning'' (University of Chicago Press, 1949) has been a perennially assigned book at many of the nation's law schools.

Mr. Levi retired from the university in 1984; his wife, Kate Sulzberger Hecht Levi, said he had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last six years.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons, John G., a lawyer in Chicago, David F., a federal trial judge in Sacramento, and Michael E., a particle physicist in Berkeley, Calif.

In the bicentennial essay for Newsweek, Mr. Levi said: ''The one thing that we ought to worry about is the propensity of this country to overreact, and to engage in cycles of bitterness. There is a kind of theme which runs through the modern world that human relationships should be looked at in terms of power relationships, in terms of the manipulation of power. I really think that's one of the most wicked ways of looking at the world. It's a very incomplete way. It strips people of their humanness. It converts all the other good attributes people have into just an ability or a desire to manipulate others.''