Sarbanes, Paul Spyros (1933-2020), was a member of the United States Senate from 1977 to 2007. Sarbanes, a Democrat, represented Maryland.
In 1987, Sarbanes served on the select committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, in which U.S. weapons were secretly sold to Iran and the profits secretly used to help Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras. At the time, there was a U.S. policy prohibiting weapons sales to Iran, and Congress had banned military aid to the contras. In 2002, as a response to corporate failures related to faulty or dishonest accounting practices, Sarbanes helped gain passage of a law designed to reform the accounting industry and restore investor confidence in financial markets. The law became known as the Sarbanes-Oxley act, after cosponsors Sarbanes and Republican Representative Michael Oxley.
Sarbanes was born in Salisbury, Maryland, on Feb. 3, 1933. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1954. As a Rhodes scholar, he attended Oxford University from 1954 to 1957. He received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1960. In 1960 and 1961, he worked as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals. He practiced law from 1961 to 1970.
From 1967 to 1971, Sarbanes served in the Maryland state House of Delegates. In 1970, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was reelected to the House in 1972 and 1974. Sarbanes won election to his first term in the U.S. Senate in 1976, and he took office in 1977. He was reelected in 1982, 1988, 1994, and 2000. He did not seek reelection in 2006, and he retired from office when his term ended in January 2007. Sarbanes died on Dec. 6, 2020.
