New Books In Law

Though relatively short, the 2022 book The Prophet of Harvard Law: James Bradley Thayer and His Legal Legacy (UP of Kansas, 2022) by Andrew Porwancher, Austin Coffey, Taylor Jipp, and Jake Mazeitis, is jam-packed with information about late 19th and early 20th Century legal history and the professionalization of American legal education. This is a moving tale of a professor whose acolytes included some of the giants of American jurisprudence (e.g., the judges and justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand and the legal scholars John Henry Wigmore and Roscoe Pound). Even those not directly taught by Thayer, such as Felix Frankfurter, lauded him as an intellectual influence. You may be thinking, “Why should I take the time to read a book about a long-dead Harvard law professor?” Well, because many of the issues that James Bradley Thayer (1831-1902) and his students grappled with have shaped almost every encounter Americans have with the law and affect our rights from the workplace to the schoo