The History of Business Law at Yale
Thomas W. Swan, Professor of Law and Dean, 1916-27
Thomas Walter Swan (1877-1975) graduated from Yale College in 1900 and attended Harvard Law School, where he was Editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review. He was brought to the Law School as Dean in 1916 from private practice in Chicago and a lectureship at the University of Chicago Law School. The subjects of Dean Swan’s research and teaching were bankruptcy and corporations. He remained the School’s dean for slightly over a decade, until his appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Although Dean Swan’s career on the bench was far longer than his time at the Law School, being an active jurist through his service as Chief Judge of the court from 1951-53, he was as instrumental as Simeon Baldwin was decades earlier in the formative years of the Law School’s history and is considered one of the School’s great deans.
Edward S. Thurston, Southmayd Professor of Law, 1919-29
Edward Sampson Thurston (1876-1948) was a professor at the Law School for a decade, having been recruited from the University of Minnesota. Thurston, a leading contracts scholar, was best known for his casebooks, Cases in Quasi-Contract, which first appeared in 1916, and Cases on Restitution, which was published in 1940. A graduate of Harvard Law School who was considered a “traditionalist” by the Law School’s Legal Realists, Thurston left Yale for his alma mater in 1930.
Karl N. Llewellyn, Assistant Professor of Law, 1919-20, 1922-25
Karl Nickerson Llewellyn (1893-1962) enrolled in the Law School after being wounded while serving as a volunteer in the German army in World War I. He was Editor-in-chief of the Law Journal 1918-19. After graduating in 1918 and receiving an advanced law degree (J.D.) in 1920, serving as an instructor at the Law School during his graduate study, Llewellyn returned to Yale in 1922 as a member of the faculty. He left Yale for Columbia after only three years, but his early Legal Realist work was to inform the rest of his career, particularly his contributions to the drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code.
With the possible exception of Jerome Frank, Llewellyn was the most prominent and important of the Yale Legal Realists of the 1920s and 1930s.
Wesley A. Sturges, Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law, 1924-61
Wesley Alba Sturges (1893-1962), an alumnus of the Law School (1923), was one of the most popular teachers on the faculty of his day and served as dean of the Law School from 1945-54. He retired from Yale in 1961 to become dean of the University of Miami Law School.
A prominent figure in Yale’s Legal Realist movement of the 1930s, Sturges wrote on a range of commercial topics, including bankruptcy, arbitration, and credit transactions. In a well-known article, “Legal Theory and Real Property Mortgages,” 37 Yale L. J. 691 (1928), Sturges (with Samuel Clark) demonstrated that doctrinal distinctions between “lien theory” and “title theory” had no impact on how courts ruled in mortgage disputes. His casebook, Cases and Materials on the Law of Credit Transactions (1936), embodied the Realist functional approach to law, organizing cases in the way a practicing lawyer would approach problems and combining what were previously separate courses in bankruptcy, mortgages and suretyship, into one course on the credit system.
Roscoe T. Steffen, Professor of Law, 1925-49
Roscoe Turner Steffen (1893-1976), a Law School alumnus (1920), was on the faculty for over two decades. A member of the Legal Realist movement, Steffen was a leading agency law scholar, and taught the first-year agency course at Yale. Steffen published on a broad range of commercial law topics, and his innovative 1933 casebook, Cases on the Law of Agency, was one of the first to attempt to integrate modern problems of business organization into the agency materials.
Alexander H. Frey, Assistant Professor of Law, 1926-30
Alexander Hamilton Frey (1898-1981) was an alumnus of Yale College (1919) and the Law School (1921; J.S.D. 1925). He was one of the talented Yale graduates hired by Dean Swan in the 1920s under Arthur Corbin’s strategy of appointing a “crop of young instructors” who had trained at Yale. He left Yale upon his marriage to a student in 1930, and joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1932. At Penn he taught labor law as well as corporate law, and played a leading role in the creation of the Philadelphia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Frey’s views concerning legal education were imbued with Yale’s Realist tradition. He advocated introducing law students to real world legal problems rather than abstract cases (such as the world of credit transactions and insurance) and to the social sciences, in order to develop empirical knowledge that could bear on resolving legal problems. Frey authored several successful casebooks, including Cases and Statutes on Corporations (1st ed. 1935), an innovative book in the Realist tradition that included materials in addition to cases, was organized on functionalist principles by business transaction rather than legal doctrine, and combined subjects typically treated in separate courses, partnerships and corporations.