Extraordinary Yank

In 20 years, Oxford University has come to depend on the solid talents of Professor Arthur Lehman Goodhart. He is a tall, burly man who dresses with a barrister's sobriety (striped pants and black coat) and has a knack for making the most complex legal principle seem simple. When he emerges from his rooms at "Univ" (University College) and strides briskly down "The High" to his lecture hall, a capacity crowd of students is always there to hear him.

In one sense, it is strange that it should be so: Arthur Goodhart is a U.S. citizen, who had every possible reason for staying right at home. The son of Manhattan Millionaire Philip Goodhart, and a nephew of Herbert Lehman, he went through Hotchkiss and Yale ('12), passed his New York State Bar exams with ease (he took Harold Medina's "cram course"). But right from the start, Arthur Goodhart was interested in something more than politics or private practice. His real passion: the great common philosophy underlying both U.S. and British law.

To pursue his passion, Arthur Goodhart decided to continue his studies at Cambridge University. There he did so well that Cambridge later asked him to stay on as a don. By 1926 he had succeeded Sir Frederick Pollock as editor of the English Law Quarterly Review. Finally in 1930, Oxford invited him to become a professor at University College.

Since then he has become the most extraordinary Yank Oxford has ever had --a sort of one-man Anglo-American alliance, whose interests have flitted back & forth across the Atlantic like the Holmes-Pollock letters themselves. His Essays in Jurisprudence and the Common Law is a major work in its field; and no barrister, solicitor or judge dares to miss his notes and comments in the Review. He became the second American to be made a King's Counsel,* one of the few ever to be knighted, the first to head Oxford's faculty of law.

Last week, at 60, Arthur Goodhart was in the U.S., with a few words to say about one of his favorite subjects. "In this country," said he, "many people apparently believe that there is great anti-American feeling in England. And the British fear that there is anti-British feeling pervading America. All in all, the American-British relationship is a happy one, and it will continue to improve."

Arthur Goodhardt had a good personal reason for believing so. Last week the 16 Fellows of University College named him their new Master. Beginning next fall, Arthur Goodhart will be the first American ever to head a college at Oxford.

* An honorary office, dating back to Sir Francis Bacon, which entitles a barrister to take precedence in court, prevents him from acting against the Crown without special royal permission. The first American to receive the title: British-born Judah P. Benjamin, onetime Secretary of State of the Confederacy, who fled to England in 1865, reclaimed his birthright as a British subject, and was made Queen's Counsel in 1872.

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