Edward F. Cox

Ed Cox is a lawyer, who was designated a corporate and finance “Super Lawyer” and has a record of public service in New York and nationally. He has served four Presidents, four New York governors and the Republican Party at the state and national levels.

Cox started his legal career at Cravath Swaine & Moore, and after serving in the Reagan Administration, was a corporate partner in the Donovan Leisure firm. He subsequently was a member of the management committee and Chairman of the Corporate Department at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.

Cox began his political activity in 1968 with the Nixon presidential campaign and has since participated in most of the subsequent presidential campaigns to date. He was Chairman of the New York Republican Party from 2009 to 2019 when he joined the 2020 Trump Victory/RNC team.

He is Secretary of the Economic Club of New York and a member of a Bank of America advisory committee and the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the governing boards of eleemosynary, business, political and foreign policy institutions.

As a Trustee of the State University of New York (SUNY) from 1995 to 2009, he developed policies and programs for SUNY’s community colleges, charter schools, teacher training, facilities construction and finance and administration.

In K-12 education, Cox is a former chairman and has been a director of Student Sponsor Partners, which supports and mentors parochial high school students, since 1985. In 1999, Cox founded SUNY’s Charter School Institute and subsequently lead SUNY’s authorization of fifty charter schools. For more than fifteen years he has been a director of the New York Institute for Special Education which has been a leading school for the blind since the 1830’s. As Chairman of the NYGOP he initiated an effort for New York to adopt an education tax credit.

Cox has traveled extensively abroad, including with or on behalf of President Nixon, as part of his law practice, on behalf of the Reagan and Bush41 Administrations and for SUNY. He has visited with numerous officials, including heads of state or government, in more than 30 countriesincluding China, Russia, Israel, Cuba,England, japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Italy, Greece, Hungry, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

In positions both in and out of government he has been a leader in the energy and environmental arenas serving President Reagan as General Counsel of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation and serving for 14 years as Chairman of New York’s Council of Parks;for more than 15 years as Chairman of theNew York League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; and for 35 years as a director of Noble Energy, an NYSE oil and gas exploration and production company.

His writings on public policy have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Antitrust Law Journal and the New York Post. In 1968 and 1969 he researched and co-authored The Nader Report on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which spawned “Nader’s Raiders” and the rejuvenation of the FTC as a consumer advocate.

Cox was born in Suffolk County, Long Island and was raised in Yorkville, New York City, where he graduated from Trinity High School. He received his B.A. degree in 1968 from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. After attempting a career in architecture at Yale in 1968 and 1969, he earned his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1972.

He is a proud veteran having joined in 1964 the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) at Princeton where he put together and accredited a seminar on war and commanded the cadet battalion. He completed officer and airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and served as a reserve officer with the 11th Special Forces Group.