New Caspersen Room Exhibition:
Professor Warren Seavey
A Retrospective Exhibition Honoring Professor Warren Seavey
on the occasion of
the publication of his memoirs
Harvard Law School
January 30, 2006
On View in the
Harvard Law School Library
Caspersen Room
January 30 - June 30, 2006
Monday - Friday 9:00am - 5:00pm
“Achievements of an Incessantly Inquiring Mind”
The Life and Teaching of Warren Abner Seavey
An exhibition in honor of Professor Seavey (1880-1966) upon the occasion of the publication of his memoirs, A Harvard Law School Professor: Warren A. Seavey’s Life and the World of Legal Education, edited with commentary by Donald B. King ‘57.
Bussey Professor of Law Warren Abner Seavey, it has been observed, let nothing distract him from his major goal—teaching law. A graduate of the Harvard Law School in 1904, Seavey taught law in five states and two foreign countries, organized two law schools and became dean of a third, all before joining the faculty of the Harvard Law School in 1927. His name became synonymous with his principal teaching field, agency, but he taught more than a dozen subjects ranging from pleading to jurisprudence.
Admired by his colleagues for his prodigious work as a Reporter for the American Law Institute on no fewer than four subjects, Seavey was revered by his students for his abilities to make them think. As his pupil the Honorable Robert E. Keaton has observed, “No other person, I venture, has matched his capacity for putting exactly the right hypothetical to make the student see instantly that his last assertion was in need of modification, or worse… Professor Seavey left us [with] his own lasting memorial—the achievements of an incessantly inquiring mind.”