[NYTr] RIP: Harold J Berman, Lawyer, Scholar and Professor

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Francis A. Boyle

RIP: Harold J Berman

I write to express my deep  sorrow at the death of my teacher,
mentor and friend, the late, great Harold J  Berman, formerly the Ames
Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. An Obituary appears in today's
New York Times. Hal taught me all about  Soviet Law, Comparative Law,
Legal History,  Jurisprudence, Religion and The Law, etc. There were
very few teachers at Harvard Law School with the breadth and depth of
his knowledge.   One of the great treats I had as his student was to
discuss  with him  different ideas he had about the Papal Investiture
Controversy and in particular Dictatus Papae while he was in the process
of writing his masterpiece Law And Revolution, which traces the origins
of Western Legal Systems back to that time, thus revolutionizing the
study of Western Legal History, as the Times correctly points out in his
Obituary. It was a real pleasure to see and talk with a world class
scholar in operation. I would also recommend his book on The Interaction
of Law and Religion in addition to his classic work on Soviet Law. He
was an excellent teacher and had a great sense of humor. Hal was  one of
my references when I started my job search and gave me some excellent
and very practical advice on how to pursue a career as a law professor.
He had a substantial role to play in helping me break into the law
teaching profession. I shall miss him.
 
May God hold Hal in the Palm of His Hand.
 
RIP.
Francis A. Boyle
Professor of Law

                         ***

The New York Times - Nov 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/us/18berman.html

Harold J. Berman, 89, Who Altered Beliefs about 
Origins of Western Law, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Harold J. Berman, a scholar whose expertise in Russian law took him to
a Soviet courtroom to fight for royalties owed Arthur Conan Doyle, and
whose forceful scholarship altered thinking about Western law’s
origins, died on Nov. 13 in Brooklyn. He was 89.

His daughter Jean Berman announced his death.

Mr. Berman wrote 25 books and more than 400 articles on subjects as
diverse as Russian culture and comparative legal history. They were
published in over 20 languages.

He taught for 37 years at Harvard Law School, where he was the Ames
professor of law. He then taught for two decades at Emory University
School of Law as the Robert W. Woodruff professor.

Mr. Berman relished unexplored intellectual geography. When he decided
to study Soviet law as a World War II Army veteran at Yale Law School,
there was no one to teach it. So he taught himself, starting with the
Russian language.

The language training served him well in Moscow in 1958, in the first
case he ever argued. Representing the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle,
creator of Sherlock Holmes, he sought to extract royalties from the
Soviet state on millions of Conan Doyle books sold in the Soviet Union.
Winning in a Moscow city court, he later lost the case on appeal to a
higher Russian Federation court.

At the time, he was a professor at Harvard Law School, one of the first
Yale graduates to have that title. His research there questioned
whether the commonly understood underpinnings of Western law were too
narrow. Inspired by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who taught him at
Dartmouth as an undergraduate, Mr. Berman saw Western history as a
river whose course was repeatedly changed by transforming revolutions.
But Mr. Berman added important wrinkles: the importance of law as an
independent historical force in its own right — not just a reflection
of other forces like economics — and an emphasis on the link between
religious tradition and law.

His most influential work was “Law and Revolution” (1983), which
rejected the old idea that modern legal systems began in the 16th
century. He argued that the 11th-century rise of papal authority with
its own canon law jump-started modern law.

The journal Constitutional Commentary said in 2005 that the book had
become “the standard point of departure for work in the field.” The
American Political Science Review said, “This may be the most important
book on law in our generation.”

In 2004, Mr. Berman published “Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the
Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition.” This explored
how the 16th-century German Reformation and the 17th-century English
Revolution gave birth to a new civil order apart from religion. Soon,
marriage certificates came from civil agencies, and church law governed
only churches.

Mr. Berman often left the ivory tower. In 2005, he joined the religious
broadcaster Pat Robertson in writing a brief to defend the Ten
Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol. He called
the commandments a foundation of Texas law, and noted that the
Declaration of Independence invoked God.

Harold Joseph Berman was born on Feb. 13, 1918, in Hartford. Under a
theory he enunciated in 2006 for The Fulton County Daily Report, an
Atlanta legal and business newspaper, he said that he, like all
children, had been a law student from a young age.

“A child says, ‘It’s my toy.’ That’s property law,” he said. “A child
says, ‘You promised me.’ That’s contract law. A child says, ‘He hit me
first.’ That’s criminal law. A child says, ‘Daddy said I could.’ That’s
constitutional law.”

Mr. Berman graduated from Dartmouth, where he was editor in chief of
the college newspaper. He studied legal history at the London School of
Economics and earned a master’s degree in history from Yale.

After a year at Yale Law School, he was drafted into the Army and later
awarded a Bronze Star for his work as a cryptographer. After finishing
at Yale, he taught at Stanford for a year and joined Harvard in 1948.

In the 1950s, even when McCarthyism reigned, Mr. Berman often visited
the Soviet Union to study and teach. He was a frequently cited source
of news about changes in Soviet law in the 1950s, when Communist
leaders were liberalizing government and society after Stalin’s death.

His stays were so long that he enrolled his children in Soviet schools.
His wife, the former Ruth Carol Harlow, started Moscow’s first P.T.A.

In addition to his wife, of 66 years, Mr. Berman is survived by his
sons Stephen, of Ashland, Ore., and John, of São Paulo, Brazil; his
daughters Jean Berman of Brooklyn, and Susanna Omac of Temecula,
Calif., seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Berman had planned a third volume in his Law and Revolution series,
and was even planning a fourth. Speaking to the Fulton County
newspaper, he was philosophical about the prospects of finishing.

“It’s up to God — if he wants to read it or not,” he said.