Biography

A preeminent legal historian, prolific scholar, and gifted teacher, Professor Robert W. Gordon’s expertise in American legal history, evidence, the legal profession, and law and globalization spans four decades, his influence on generations of lawyers and legal scholars incalculable. He has written extensively on contract law, legal philosophy, and on the history and current ethics and practices of the organized bar. Professor Gordon is known for his key works, The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1992), and Storie Critiche del Diritto (Critical Legal Histories) (1995), and is editor of Law, Society, and History: Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman, which examines and celebrates the scholarship of Stanford’s Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law Lawrence Friedman.

Professor Gordon received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School. Before going to law school, he worked as a newspaper reporter and served in the U.S. Army. Following law school, he served in the Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts (1971). Professor Gordon taught previously at Stanford Law School in 1983-1995, and most recently, he was the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. He also taught at the University of Buffalo Law School SUNY and the University of Wisconsin, and was a visiting professor at Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Toronto, and the European University Institute.

Professor Gordon has served on several American Bar Association and Connecticut Bar task forces on professional ethics and practice and on the Advisory Board of the Legal Profession Program of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation). He also is a past president of the American Society for Legal History. His forthcoming publications include: Lawyers of the Republic; Taming the Past: Law in History and History in Law (essays on legal history and the uses of history in legal argument); and The American Legal Profession, 1870-2000.

In the News

• Dewey's Decline And The Rise Of High-Risk Big Law
  CNN - Money, May 15, 2012
• The Cautionary Tale Of Dewey & LeBoeuf
  The New York Times, May 06, 2012

Courses & Programs

Courses

• History of American Law
• Legal Studies Workshop

Publications & Cases

• Robert W. Gordon, Book Review: Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, 60 Journal of Legal Education 549 (2011).
• Robert W. Gordon, How the Justices Get What They Want, Book Review of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court by Jeff Shesol; and, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices by Noah Feldman, The New York Review of Books, Dec. 8, 2011.
• Catherine L. Fisk and Robert W. Gordon, Foreword: "Law as...": Theory and Method in Legal History, 1 UC Irvine Law Review 519 (2011).
• Lawrence M. Friedman, Robert W. Gordon, Sophie Pirie, and Edwin Whatley, Law, Lawyers, and Legal Practice in Silicon Valley: a Preliminary Report in Law in Many Societies: A Reader, Lawrence M. Friedman, Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, Manuel A. Gómez, editors, Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2011.
• Robert W. Gordon, Morton J. Horwitz, editors, Law, Society, and History: Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Robert W. Gordon, Are Lawyers Friends of Democracy? in The Paradox of Professionalism: Lawyers and the Possibility of Justice, Scott L. Cummings, editor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Robert W. Gordon, The Path of the Lawyer, 110 Harvard Law Review 1013 (1997).