A Yankee Socrates

The titles of his fat, cloth-covered tomes would hardly thrill a random bookstore browser. But in a lawyer's den or a judge's chambers, the four volumes of Williston on Sales or the nine volumes of Williston on Contracts never gather dust. "The business life of this nation is based on the writings and the legislation that Samuel Williston drafted," says Harvard Law Professor Arthur E. Sutherland.

Born shortly after the First Battle of Bull Run, Samuel Williston was the grandson of the founder of Massachusetts' 122-year-old Williston Academy. Admitted to Harvard, he garnered some repute by winning his H as a penny-farthing bicycle racer, soon earned academic laurels as head of his law school class, and became a full professor at the age of 34. Though his name and works spread abroad, Williston seldom strayed from his native Cambridge, Mass., where he taught law at Harvard for nearly half a century. He died there last week at 101, the oldest alumnus of both Harvard College ('82) and its law school ('88).

Legend holds that Williston was the last Harvard professor to wear a starched wing collar while lecturing, but his delivery was folksy, drawing on imagery that enlivened dull debates on commercial law. He would begin in his Yankee twang, "I'll trade my horse Dobbin for your minced pie," and his rapt listeners would be carried off on another excursion into law that was more social science than cold cases. As Williston once said: "Law is a science, but it is a pragmatic science. It can rarely deal with the absolute."

His specialty was contracts, the binding obligations of society. Soon after 1900, years when the U.S. was settling down as a federal union, he helped forge the first viable legal mechanisms for uniform commerce among the states. His influence was even greater on the students that he helped to form, including Felix Frankfurter and the late Robert A. Taft. Wrote one of Williston's pupils, the late Judge Learned Hand: "While this Socrates of ours never coerced our assent, like his prototype he did not let us alone until we had peered into the corners of our minds, and had in some measure discovered the litter they contained."

On Williston's retirement from Harvard in 1938, his students gave the dean of U.S. law education a silver bowl. It was inscribed, In consideration of natural love and affection. White-thatched Williston, who always knew when a contract was binding, replied with gentle legal wit: "The feeling is mutual, so that makes it bilateral."

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