Alfred Benesch was one of the three principal founders of John Marshall School of Law, where he taught Municipal Law, as well as a founding member of the Cleveland firm Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff. His undergraduate and law degrees were from Harvard University. As a young lawyer, he defended the rights of the Peddlers’ Self-Defense Association to police protection and in 1922, in a series of letters to the President of Harvard subsequently published in The New York Times, he successfully challenged a proposal to establish quotas on Jewish people admitted to the school. He was elected to the Cleveland City Council in 1912, and in 1914, Mayor Newton D. Baker appointed him the city’s public safety director. He served on the Cleveland Board of Education for 37 years, one of the numerous boards he served on throughout the city.