Legal Biography Commons^™

Robert H. Jackson's Oral Arguments Before The New York Court Of Appeals, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

New Yorkers recall with pride that Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892-1954) was one of us. Jackson became western New York State's leading lawyer during twenty years (1913-1934) in private practice, based primarily in Jamestown. He then went to Washington, D.C., to join FDR's New Deal, and later became an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941-1954).

We also know Robert Jackson as a great American courtroom lawyer. He was perhaps the finest Supreme Court advocate ever during his years as Solicitor General (1938-1939) and then Attorney General (1940-1941) of the United States. During 1945-1946, Justice Jackson served as …

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the under-theorized quality of Williston's scholarship—to contemporary …