Arthur L. Corbin, William K. Townsend Professor of Law, 1903-43

Arthur L. Corbin

REFERENCES:

Robert W. Gordon, “Professors and Policymakers,” in Anthony T. Kronman, ed., History of the Yale Law School (2004).

Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927-1960 (1986).

John Henry Schlegel, “American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science: The Singular Case of Underhill Moore,” 29 Buffalo L. Rev. 195 (1980).

Arthur L. Corbin (1875-1967), an alumnus of the Law School (1899), became the school’s first full-time professor in 1903, and remained a force at the School for over five decades. Corbin was a giant of American contract law and an intellectual father of the Legal Realist movement that blossomed at Yale in the 1930s. His comprehensive treatise Corbin on Contracts, in updated versions, still serves as a standard reference for judges and lawyers.

Typical of Corbin’s scholarship—and central to the Realist project—was the effort to probe whether important legal principles did in fact inhere in the cases that ostensibly supported them. A famous example was Corbin’s demonstration that “consideration” was not always required to make a contract binding. His recognition that “reliance” often supplied an alternative basis to consideration for contract enforcement was ultimately embodied in section 90 of the Restatement of Contracts. 

Corbin was also instrumental in the Progressive-era project of softening the traditional lines between “private” and “public” law. In an influential article, “Offer and Acceptance and Some of the Resulting Legal Relations,” 26 Yale L.J. 204 (1917), Corbin argued that state enforcement of contracts necessarily required the state to make policy choices as to how, when, and for whom that force should be used. These insights were central to the legislative and judicial revolutions of the New Deal. Notwithstanding Corbin’s close intellectual association with Legal Realism, he was not a political progressive. In histories of the Realist movement, John Schlegel consequently does not consider Corbin a Realist, referring to his “conservative” politics, whereas Laura Kalman does, in part because the Realists considered him one, including Karl Llewellyn, who called Corbin “Dad.” Corbin himself declined the Realist label, in a 1960 letter to Llewellyn: “I can join cheerfully with you in your kind of ‘Realism’ but I never wanted to belong to the ‘Realistic School’ or any other School (except, perhaps, the Yale Law School).”

At the Law School, a scholarship fund was established in his honor in 1958.