By Fred R. Shapiro
Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and
Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law School;
Editor, The Yale Book of Quotations
When I compiled the recently published Yale Book of Quotations, my intention was to create the most accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date quotation dictionary. I did not specifically seek to collect quotations relating to Yale Law School, but because I have worked at the Law School for twenty years, am familiar with its heritage and personalities, and am generally interested in law and legal history, it was inevitable that a fair number of quotations by YLS graduates and faculty would end up in my compilation. The fact that Yale Law School people have traditionally had wide-ranging interests, embracing the fullest version of legal culture and also extending beyond law to politics, literature, and many other fields, did not hurt in ensuring that my roster of the 13,000 or so most famous quotations would include a good collection of sound bites from those who have studied or taught at the school.
For example, one of the most renowned quotations to emerge from Supreme Court jurisprudence is Potter Stewart’s ’41 characterization of pornography: “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio [1964]). This one may have had a collaborative YLS-alum genesis, since Ray Lamontagne ’64 has alerted me that the line seems to have originated in
a conversation between Stewart and his then-clerk
Alan Novak ’63. Other quotations from Supreme Court justices who attended YLS have also entered the language:
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the
great exigencies of government.
David Davis Class of 1835,
Ex parte Milligan (1867)
The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only
one thing—one person, one vote.
William O. Douglas
[taught at Yale Law School, 1928–34],
Gray v. Sanders (1963)
It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.
Abe Fortas ’33, Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Community School Dist. (1969)
William Howard Taft was a Supreme Court chief justice (and, incidentally, also a United States president) who taught at Yale Law School from 1913 to 1921. His judicial opinions did not feature deathless pronouncements, but he had a fine sense of humor and his self-deprecating quips about his weight (about 350 pounds) have lived on. For example, when Taft was stuck at a railroad station and was told that the train only stopped there if a number of passengers wished to come aboard, he telegraphed the conductor: “Stop at Hicksville. Large party waiting to catch train.” Anson Phelps Stokes would recall that “when I suggested to him … that he occupy a Chair of Law at the University, he said that he was afraid that a Chair would not be adequate, but that if we would provide a Sofa of Law, it might be all right.”