Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Harvard Law School: "Incubator of Greatness"

Not my characterization--believe me--but that of Henry Luce's Life Magazine, in one of the articles on the Harvard Law School that David Warrington, Special Collections Librarian at the Harvard Law Library, has turned up in the Google Books' digitization of the periodical. As Warrington explains over at Et Seq.:
LIFE was the leading twentieth-century magazine of photo-journalism, appearing weekly from 1936 until 1972. With its familiar logo displaying the title in white sans-serif type against a red rectangular background, the magazine dominated its market with a circulation that eventually reached 13.5 million copies a week. In 2008 Google Books digitized the complete file, and it is now a simple matter to obtain hundreds of images of the Harvard Law School, its students and faculty from this period.
The earliest photo spread Warrington found, from November 1937, treated the start of the deanship of James M. Landis. It included this photograph on the new dean, which I'm delighted to have just in time for a class on Donald A. Ritchie's "Reforming the Regulatory Process: Why James Landis Changed His Mind," Business History Review 54 (Autumn 1980): 283-302. I also like the shot of the New-Dealer-in-training, Edward Prichard, sticking out his tongue at an unfortunate advocate in a moot court competition.