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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Judith Brennan

William Joseph Brennan III, an influential New Jersey lawyer who was a senior partner in a Princeton firm and a former president of the New Jersey State Bar Association, died May 17 at Princeton Hospital. He was 71 and lived in Princeton.
The cause was cancer, his family said. Mr. Brennan was a partner in Smith, Stratton, Wise, Heher & Brennan, the firm he joined in 1970. He litigated civil, aviation and insurance cases. He was president of the state bar in 1984 and 1985 and of the state's Federal Bar Association in 1992 and 1993. He was born in Orange, N.J., the son of William J. Brennan Jr., a lawyer who went on to serve as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1956 to 1990. The younger Brennan graduated from Colgate University in 1955, served as a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps until 1959 and received his law degree from Yale in 1962. After he spent five years with a law firm in New York, the New Jersey attorney general at the time, Arthur J. Sills, invited him to join the administration of Gov. Richard J. Hughes in Trenton. He did so as an assistant attorney general and counsel to the newly created Department of Community Affairs.
He left to join a prestigious law firm, Smith Stratton. Mr. Brennan is survived by his wife of 44 years, Georgianna Franklin Brennan; a son, William J. IV, of Philadelphia; a sister, Nancy Brennan of Plymouth, Mass.; a brother, Hugh L, of Potomac, Md.; and two granddaughters.