Alexander H. Frey, Assistant Professor of Law, 1926-30

Alexander H. Frey

REFERENCES:

Photograph courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Law School. Artist: Lucius Crowell.

“Alexander Hamilton Frey, 83, Professor and Civil Rights Leader,” Phil. Inquirer, Sept. 1, 1981.

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

F. Hodge O’Neal, “Alexander Hamilton Frey: His Contributions to the Law of Corporations and Business Associations,” 116 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1140 (1968).

“Yale Law Professor to Wed Girl Student,” N.Y. Times, Jan. 25, 1930, at 12.

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.

Alexander 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. “Some Thoughts on Law Teaching and the Social Sciences,” 82 U. Pa. L. Rev. 463 (1934). Like his former Yale colleagues Roscoe Steffen and Wesley Sturges, he criticized as anachronistic casebooks that retained an unbalanced emphasis on partnerships despite the increased use of the corporation in business, and suggested that the agency course should be integrated with the business organizations course, so that students would be able to compare both the unincorporated and incorporated business form. E.g., “Book Review,” 83 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1037 (1935). 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.