Grand Inquisitor

In a large class at the Law School some years ago, a student had brought up the topic of crooked politicians and to illustrate his argument, he named a few of the bosses of the day. At this point Warren A. Seavey, Bussey Professor of Law, interrupted. Quite off-handedly, he suggested that the student could use the current mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley, as an equally good example of a dishonest politician. Seavey did not know as he said this that Mayor Curley's son was sitting in the front row of the class.

The Professor's ignorance did not last very long, however. The son ceremoniously withdrew from the Law School because his father's honor had been insulted, and Mayor Curley made a public statement to explain his son's action. News of the affair reached as far as the newspapers of Shanghai, Seavey recalls.

The discomfort and outraged cries produced by this incident are typical of the reactions Seavey has been eliciting from his students throughout his teaching career. In most cases, however, the effect is intentional--the desired response to a purposely acid classroom technique. Indeed, his teaching method has often been considered the classic example of the Socratic method in legal instruction, the question and answer system which teaches students by exasperating them.

"Socratic" is just one description; exasperated law students being what they are, others are unprintable. Yet most lawyers who have studied under Seavey would probably agree with Frank Pace, Jr., former Army Secretary, who calls the professor's questions "infuriating" but adds that they "caused us to ponder our own solutions and eventually to reach others more sound." Roscoe Pound places Seavey "among the outstanding teachers in the history of the Harvard Law School." Such tributes are particularly appropriate now, incidentally, for Professor Seavey is retiring this June after 50 years of teaching the Law.

For Seavey, 50 years of studying and teaching such subjects as torts, agency, and restitution have been more colorful than many would imagine. A native of Boston, he graduated from the College and the Law School, entering practice locally in 1904. Two years later, at the suggestion of Dean Ames, he left for China to organize a law school at the Imperial Pei Yang University. For his five years of work there the Chinese government decorated him with the Order of the Double Dragon--which he says, means virtually nothing.

Back in the United States, Seavey lectured a year at the Law Schol here and then embarked on a series of law professorships which found him successively at the University of Oklahoma, Tulane, Indiana, Nebraska (where he was Dean of the law School), Pennsylvania, and finally back at Harvard in 1927 as a full professor. He has been here ever since.

The years of wandering were enlightening, and he returned with valuable experience in teaching and administration. At the University of Nebraska, for example, he had become Dean in 1920 of a law school so easy that it contained half of the university football team. Six years later, when he left for Pennsylvania, there wasn't a football player left. "At first," he says, "alumni objected to what I was doing, but then they looked up and saw that they had a better law school."

China and Nebraska were interesting, but the job that Seavey remembers best was in Baune, France, at the end of the first World War. The armistice had just been signed, and two million American soldiers were left in France with nothing to do until they could get transportation home. To keep the troops busy, the allies set up a temporary university, and at the last moment the Army causally added a law school. Captain Seavey was assigned to set it up. Given two old barracks to work in, he immediately--without authority--commissioned Army carpenters to make classrooms out of them and hi-jacked a shipment of chairs headed for GHQ. Acting with consummate nerve, Seavey even turned in an order for a thousand fountain pens to equip the students he did not yet have. (The Army was not that dumb, however; it refused.) Finally, just four days after the whole thing started, he was ready to begin teaching. More than 150 students showed up and the school lasted--very successfully--for some three months. He ended up with another medal, the French Officier d'Academie, but that--so he says--meant nothing either.

Such unorthodox antics are not deemed seemly in a Professor of Law at Harvard, however, and Seavey settled down in 1927 to the more conventional pursuits of his profession, notably scholarship. A member of the American Law Institute, an organization devoted to codifying the case law in various fields, Seavey has been the Reporter for Agency law since 1923 and has taken part in the Restatements of the law of Judgments, Torts, and Restitution--all this in addition to a professor's usual output of texts and casebooks.

The best argument for teaching the Law instead of practicing it, in Seavey's opinion, is the advantage of dealing with Law School students instead of clients. And the best thing about Law School students, he continues, is that "they have not yet lost their illusions. I was a socialist for six months once when i was a student. It's nice to see people with illusions, even though you know that they are illusions."

It is Seavey's greatest source of pride, and perhaps the Law School's greatest source of gratitude, that he has taken it upon himself to be friend and adviser to thousands and thousands of students who are now lawyers scattered all over the world. Seavey spends at least half of his time talking with students--in classes, in hallways, in his office. Call Professor Seavey on the phone to ask for an appointment, and he just says, "Come up anytime. I'm always here." Go up to his office in Langdell and there he is, sitting at his desk, jacket off, vest unbuttoned, and one of a large collection of popes in his mouth. As Professor Zechariah Chafee has said, "When you go to Warren Seavey for help you know you will get it."