Arthur Branch

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DA Arthur Branch
Law & Order character

Time on show	2002-
Succeeded	Nora Lewin
Preceded	Current
First appearance	American Jihad
Portrayed by	Fred Dalton Thompson

Arthur Branch is a fictional character on the long-running TV crime drama Law & Order, portrayed by former Senator Fred Dalton Thompson. Thompson was also a regular cast member as Branch on the short-lived spin-off Law & Order: Trial by Jury, making him one of the few actors to have a regular role on two TV series simultaneously as the same character.

Branch and his wife, Maggie, have lived in New York City since the early 1980s. He was elected the District Attorney of New York County in 2002, replacing DA Nora Lewin. His administration was a sharp contrast to that of Lewin, as he had little difficulty in accepting capital punishment in certain cases, and condemned what he perceived to be any outlandish interpretations of the US Constitution, including the existence of a right to privacy. This often put him in conflict with Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, a relatively liberal centrist, and his previous Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn, a liberal idealist and leftist feminist. He had few quarrels with Alexandra Borgia, who was more conservative in her viewpoints by half than Southerlyn. His relationship with Consuela Rubirosa, who is not quite so liberal as Southerlyn, remains to be fully seen.

While his legal philosophy is decidedly conservative, he is not blindly partisan; he ascribes cynical, political motives to drug prohibition and is not averse to seeking alternatives to the death penalty when he thinks it appropriate. While he personally opposes abortion rights, in an SVU episode, he ordered Olivia Benson and Casey Novak to immediately arrest a doctor who deliberately misled a young pregnant woman to ensure her pregnancy would develop past the legal time limit for the procedure, thus prompting her to desperately ask her boyfriend to assault her to induce a still birth.

Branch with District Attorney Investigators Lennie Briscoe and Hector Salazar and ADAs Tracey Kibre and Kelly Gaffney

In 2005, he fired Southerlyn because he felt she was inappropriately sympathetic toward the defendant she was prosecuting. When he fired her, she revealed that she was a lesbian.

Branch, a Republican, would be the first member of that party to serve as New York County District Attorney since Governor Thomas Dewey.

When Thompson first accepted the role, he was still a sitting member of the Senate (his term would not expire for several more weeks), thus making Thompson the first sitting US Senator to accept an acting position - although he had already been an actor for many years before being elected.