Daniel R. Coquillette – författare

A history of Harvard Law School in the twentieth century, focusing on the school’s precipitous decline prior to 1945 and its dramatic postwar resurgence amid national crises and internal discord.By the late nineteenth century, Harvard Law School had transformed legal education and become the preeminent professional school in the nation. But in the early 1900s, HLS came to the brink of financial failure and lagged its peers in scholarly innovation. It also honed an aggressive intellectual culture famously described by Learned Hand: “In the universe of truth, they lived by the sword. They asked no quarter of absolutes, and they gave none.” After World War II, however, HLS roared back. In this magisterial study, Bruce Kimball and Daniel Coquillette chronicle the school’s near collapse and dramatic resurgence across the twentieth century.The school’s struggles resulted in part from a debilitating cycle of tuition dependence, which deepened through the 1940s, as well as the suicides of two deans and the dalliance of another with the Nazi regime. HLS stubbornly resisted the admission of women, Jews, and African Americans, and fell behind the trend toward legal realism. But in the postwar years, under Dean Erwin Griswold, the school’s resurgence began, and Harvard Law would produce such major political and legal figures as Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Elena Kagan, and President Barack Obama. Even so, the school faced severe crises arising from the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Critical Legal Studies, and its failure to enroll and retain people of color and women, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Based on hitherto unavailable sources—including oral histories, personal letters, diaries, and financial records—The Intellectual Sword paints a compelling portrait of the law school widely considered the most influential in the world.

Harvard Law School is the oldest and, arguably, the most influential law school in the nation. U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, and foreign heads of state, along with senators, congressional representatives, social critics, civil rights activists, university presidents, state and federal judges, military generals, novelists, spies, Olympians, film and TV producers, CEOs, and one First Lady have graduated from the school since its founding in 1817.During its first century, Harvard Law School pioneered revolutionary educational ideas, including professional legal education within a university, Socratic questioning and case analysis, and the admission and training of students based on academic merit. But the school struggled to navigate its way through the many political, social, economic, and legal crises of the century, and it earned both scars and plaudits as a result. On the Battlefield of Merit offers a candid, critical, definitive account of a unique legal institution during its first century of influence.Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball examine the school’s ties with institutional slavery, its buffeting between Federalists and Republicans, its deep involvement in the Civil War, its reluctance to admit minorities and women, its anti-Catholicism, and its financial missteps at the turn of the twentieth century. On the Battlefield of Merit brings the story of Harvard Law School up to 1909—a time when hard-earned accomplishment led to self-satisfaction and vulnerabilities that would ultimately challenge its position as the leading law school in the nation. A second volume will continue this history through the twentieth century.

The most unique and important of all early American law reports are those of Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775). These are the first reports of continental America's oldest court, the Superior Court of Judicature of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, direct ancestor to today's Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Quincy's candid accounts of events great and small shed light on life in the American colonies just before the Revolution. Reports such as ""Paxton's Case of the Writs of Assistance"" (1761) have become great landmarks of American constitutional law, cited by the Supreme Court of the United States. Others, such as Hanlon v. Thayer (1764), involved important women's rights, or, such as Oliver v. Sale (1762) and Allison v. Cockran (1764), vividly demonstrated the legal establishment of slavery. Even the so-called routine cases - those involving sale of goods and early consumer protection, keeping a 'bawdy house', women fighting for their children's legitimacy, pirates, apprentices, militia men, double-crossers and frauds, 'fences' for stolen goods, and many more - provide an invaluable picture of our early legal system and colonial society. Daniel R. Coquillette not only provides new annotations for these cases, first annotated by Samuel Quincy Jr. in 1865, but also includes an extensive introduction that sets out a lucid and compelling road map to these historic reports and their continuing significance.

Successful Boston lawyer, active member of the Sons of Liberty, and noted political essayist, Josiah Quincy Junior (1744–1775) left a lasting impression on those he met - for his passion in the courtroom as well as his orations in the Old South Meeting House, and for his determination to live fully, despite being afflicted with a disease that would cut his life short. Gathered in this, the sixth and final volume of the Quincy Papers, are Quincy’s surviving correspondence, his essays for the Boston Press written between 1767 and 1774, and his 1774 pamphlet Observations, which was the culmination of his thinking and writing about the problem of balancing imperial authority and colonial liberty. He represented, as well as any of his longer-lived contemporaries, the difficulty of protesting British policy without turning on Britain itself, the uneasy blending of reasoned political discourse with a desire to denounce perceived injustice, and the quest to find a peaceful solution and yet reserve the right to use force if all else failed. In his attempt to define and defend American rights, he borrowed as readily from classical sources as modern, drawing on a rich philosophical and legal tradition that served him well throughout his public life. He well understood the power of the ideas that he mustered for political debate. That understanding also shows through in Quincy’s other writings, from his law commonplace book and Latin legal maxims (in volume 2) to the journal of his 1773 southern journey (in volume 3) to his still-cited reports for cases argued in the Massachusetts Superior Court from 1761 to 1772 (in volumes 4 and 5).This last volume stands as a companion piece to the first. There, Quincy’s political ideas are discussed and traced, in part through Quincy’s political commonplace book, compiled between 1770 and 1774. Here, readers can follow how Quincy expressed those ideas in the newspaper pieces and pamphlet that became an essential part of the debate over rights in the empire. Here too can be found his deep concern, expressed in letters from London to his beloved wife, Abigail, that he serve Massachusetts - “my country,” as he called it - well, that he give his last full measure of devotion, if necessary, to the patriot cause.