Marvin A. Chirelstein, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, 1965-82

Marvin A. Chirelstein

REFERENCES:

Faculty Profile, Marvin A. Chirelstein.

Roberta Romano, “After the Revolution in Corporate Law,” 55 J. Leg. Educ. 342 (2005).

Marvin A. Chirelstein (1928-2015) was a member of the faculty for close to two decades when he resigned to enter private practice.  Thereafter he joined the faculty of the Columbia University Law School. He returned to Yale as an adjunct lecturer upon his retirement from Columbia.

Chirelstein was both a distinguished scholar and a gifted teacher in the corporate law and tax areas, attracting large enrollments in the courses that he taught. When he arrived at Yale from Rutgers in 1965, Chirelstein was dragooned by Dean Rostow to teach the “Business Units II” class, a course that consisted “entirely of case-annotations for commonly used bond indentures and other boiler-plate documents,” and that was, as he put it, “the most boring and insignificant course ever offered anywhere at any time in any language.” The 1960’s were, however, a fervent period in the theoretical development of modern finance.  Finding reading the Journal of Finance more stimulating than reading bond covenants, Chirelstein incorporated those new concepts into the course. His groundbreaking casebook (coauthored with Victor Brudney of Harvard Law School), Cases and Materials on Corporate Finance (1st ed. 1972), revolutionized the subject by introducing modern finance into the business law curriculum. 

In addition, Chirelstein’s Federal Income Taxation: a law student’s guide to the leading cases and concepts, first published in 1977, has gone through over a dozen editions, and is the preeminent text explicating and synthesizing the concepts of income taxation. The text is an example of the rare book that impacts the content of classroom teaching. By making the income tax code far more comprehensible to students, the book has permitted tax teachers to spend more time on policy issues and less on code mechanics. When he joined the Columbia faculty, Chirelstein began teaching contracts. This led to his authoring another best-selling text which is considered a classic in the field, Concepts and Case Analysis in the Law of Contracts.  

A colloquium on contemporary issues in law and business was established in his honor at the Law School in 2006.