Wesley Liebeler

Wesley James "Jim" Liebeler (May 9, 1931 – September 25, 2002) was an American law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and later at George Mason University. In 1964 he was one of the staff attorneys on the Warren Commission's inquiry into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Liebeler was born in Langdon, North Dakota. After graduating, he practiced law on Wall Street for the firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, where he primarily worked on corporate litigation cases. and was assigned to research the background of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. A few weeks before the Commission released its summary findings in the Warren Report, Liebeler wrote a twenty-six page internal memo that included his detailed comments after reviewing galley proofs of Chapter 4 of the Report (the chapter was titled "The Assassin"). He essentially played the role of devil's advocate to identify what he viewed as weaknesses in the Commission's case against Oswald. This memo, later known as the "Liebeler Memorandum", was first published by David Lifton in a 1968 small-press book, Document Addendum to the Warren Report.

When Liebeler testified in 1977 before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), he was asked about his memorandum and the concerns he had raised. He replied that they involved "problems ranging from matters of form and location of footnotes" to his feeling that the chapter "was overwritten in the sense that it made statements that could not really be supported by the nature of the underlying evidence."

In 1965 Liebeler joined UCLA Law School, where he taught antitrust law for more than 30 years, eventually attaining the title of professor-emeritus.

On September 25, 2002, Liebeler was killed along with his flight instructor when their Piper Twin Comanche crashed into New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. The National Transportation Safety Board summarized the probable cause of the accident: "The flight instructor's failure to maintain airplane control, which resulted in an uncontrolled collision with water."

Liebeler was survived by his wife Susan and their daughter and two sons.