A favorite.
In 1958, the renowned Judge Learned Hand brought a cycle of lectures at Harvard Law School to a close by looking back at his teachers from his student days in the 1890s. It remains my preferred passage about law professors, and a model for the standards we in the profession should strive to meet. Judge Hand wrote:
Decades earlier than I care to admit, I found myself seated in this very building, listening to — or rather, being examined by — men, all but one of whom are now gone. What I learned from them encompassed not only the Rule in Shelley’s Case, or the duties one owes to an invited guest — as we then called him — or how the law decides whether a contract has formed, or how deficient the old partnership doctrine was before the advent of Cory on Accounts, or in which jurisdictions a corporation is considered “present.” To be sure, I absorbed those topics as well as I could, but I took away much more. I left with the imprint of a circle of devoted scholars; patient, considerate, courteous and kindly, whom nothing could daunt and nothing could bribe. The memory of those men has stayed with me ever since. Time and again they have aided me when the work felt heavy, the task seemed trivial, and the confusion appeared indecipherable. From them I learned that our true satisfaction and reward come from practicing our craft with care. In the universe of truth they lived by the sword; they asked no quarter of absolutes and they gave none. Go ye and do likewise.
So, so good.
My understanding is that Learned Hand studied under a cadre of professors who remain widely recognized names in the field: Christopher Columbus Langdell, James Barr Ames, John Chipman Gray, James Bradley Thayer, and Samuel Williston among them. His professor who was still living at the time of Hand’s lecture was Williston, who died in 1963 at the age of 101. Judge Hand himself passed away in 1961, at the age of 89.
