Griffin Bell, Carter's Attorney General, 90

Griffin Bell, the dean of Georgia lawyers and the United States Attorney General during most of the presidency of his childhood neighbor Jimmy Carter, died at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on Monday morning. He was 90.

A spokesman for King & Spalding, the law firm where he was senior counsel, said the cause of death was complications from pancreatic cancer.

Judge Bell, as he was almost always addressed long after his 15 years' service on the Federal bench, embodied more than a few of the clichés about Southern gentlemen of the law, with his small-town background, a manner that was often called courtly, self-deprecating humor, a gift for persuasion and an instinct for politics.