Word: seavey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Seavey, 50 years of studying and teaching such subjects as torts, agency, and restitution have been more colorful than many would imagine. A native of Boston, he graduated from the College and the Law School, entering practice locally in 1904. Two years later, at the suggestion of Dean Ames, he left for China to organize a law school at the Imperial Pei Yang University. For his five years of work there the Chinese government decorated him with the Order of the Double Dragon--which he says, means virtually nothing...
Back in the United States, Seavey lectured a year at the Law Schol here and then embarked on a series of law professorships which found him successively at the University of Oklahoma, Tulane, Indiana, Nebraska (where he was Dean of the law School), Pennsylvania, and finally back at Harvard in 1927 as a full professor. He has been here ever since...
China and Nebraska were interesting, but the job that Seavey remembers best was in Baune, France, at the end of the first World War. The armistice had just been signed, and two million American soldiers were left in France with nothing to do until they could get transportation home. To keep the troops busy, the allies set up a temporary university, and at the last moment the Army causally added a law school. Captain Seavey was assigned to set it up. Given two old barracks to work in, he immediately--without authority--commissioned Army carpenters to make classrooms...
Such unorthodox antics are not deemed seemly in a Professor of Law at Harvard, however, and Seavey settled down in 1927 to the more conventional pursuits of his profession, notably scholarship. A member of the American Law Institute, an organization devoted to codifying the case law in various fields, Seavey has been the Reporter for Agency law since 1923 and has taken part in the Restatements of the law of Judgments, Torts, and Restitution--all this in addition to a professor's usual output of texts and casebooks...
...best argument for teaching the Law instead of practicing it, in Seavey's opinion, is the advantage of dealing with Law School students instead of clients. And the best thing about Law School students, he continues, is that "they have not yet lost their illusions. I was a socialist for six months once when i was a student. It's nice to see people with illusions, even though you know that they are illusions...