Fordham Law Review Volume 87 Issue 3 Article 4 2018 History and Harvard Law School Bruce A. Kimball Ohio State University Daniel R. Coquillette Boston College Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Legal Education Commons Recommended Citation Bruce A. Kimball and Daniel R. Coquillette, History and Harvard Law School, 87 Fordham L. Rev. 883 (2018). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol87/iss3/4 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. HISTORY AND HARVARD LAW SCHOOL Bruce A. Kimball* & Daniel R. Coquillette** INTRODUCTION In their seminal article, Alfred Konefsky and John Henry Schlegel saw institutional histories of law schools as the graveyard of academic reputations.1 So why write institutional histories? Due to the leadership of Robert Kaczorowski and William Nelson, and the generosity of Fordham University School of Law and New York University School of Law, an important conference took place between July 2 and July 4, 2018, at New York University’s Villa La Pietra outside of Florence. The purpose was to encourage good institutional history and to define its value. We had recently published the first volume of a new history of Harvard Law School, On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century (“On the Battlefield of Merit”) and are completing another volume, The Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School, the Second Phase (“The Intellectual Sword”).