Charles H. Morin, 85, a prominent Washington, DC lawyer and co-founder of the law firm now known as Dickstein Shapiro LLP, died Monday, August 20, 2007, at his home at the Jupiter Hills Club in Florida. He had heart and lung ailments.

Mr. Morin was born in Waltham, Mass., on August 18, 1922. He attended public schools in Weston, Mass. and at Phillips Exeter Academy, and served as an Army Captain and aide to General Thomas Hickey in Southeast Asia during World War II. He graduated with a B.S. from Harvard College in 1943, and received his LL.B., cum laude, in 1949, from Boston University, where he was editor of the Boston University Law Review.

In 1972, Mr. Morin joined the Washington, DC-based law firm Dickstein Shapiro LLP. That same year, he was appointed by President Nixon as Chairman of the Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling. This commission, comprising four members each from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and seven public members, conducted a comprehensive study of gambling in the United States and foreign countries, and made specific recommendations to Congress and the Executive Branch in October 1976. Many of these recommendations subsequently were enacted into law.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Morin was lead counsel in a lengthy administrative proceeding against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff, which had sought to impose restrictive conditions on investment companies valuing portfolio securities using the “amortized cost method.” As a result of this proceeding, the SEC adopted rules consistent with the position of Dickstein Shapiro’s client, which made possible the subsequent growth of the “money market fund” industry to its present trillion-dollar status.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Morin, then a director of a national bank, perceived the deterioration of banking ethics and the unwise direction of liberalized banking regulation, and thus provided the financing for the founding of the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University School of Law. Through the Center, Boston University offers Master of Law degree programs in banking law and international banking law, and is the only law school in the country to have elevated banking law to this academic level. Mr. Morin served as a lecturer in tax law and estate planning at the law school.

Mr. Morin’s wide-ranging professional accomplishments also included serving as a lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency, representing the general board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, serving as counsel to Charles W. Colson in disbarment proceedings in several states, representing former Senators Edward Brooke and John Tower, counseling Bear Stearns Companies in government relations, and, most recently, serving as counsel to the independent directors of one of the largest mutual fund companies in the United States.

Mr. Morin is survived by his wife of fifty-six years, Elizabeth; three sons, Charles of Woburn, Mass.; James of Coral Gables, Fla.; and Peter of Scituate, Mass.; nine grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.