Floyd Russell Mechem was born on May 9, 1858 at Nunda, New York. He was the son of Isaac J. and Celestia (Russell) Mechem. While he was still a boy, his father died leaving him to assume part of the responsibility of supporting the family.
Mechem attended the public schools at Battle Creek, Michigan, and Titusville, Pennsylvania. Deprived of the opportunity to attend college, he completed his education outside.
At the age of twenty-one Mechem was admitted to the Michigan bar and for the following few years devoted himself to the practice of law, first in Battle Creek (1879 - 87), then in Detroit (1887 - 93). In 1891-92 he held a professorship at the Detroit College of Law and from that time on devoted the greater part of his time to legal education. In 1892 he became a member of the faculty of the University of Michigan and remained there, teaching and writing, until 1903 when he moved to Chicago to assume a professorship in the newly organized law school of the University of Chicago. He remained in this position until his death. He was president for several years of the University of Chicago Settlement; a member of the district appeal board, number 1, northern district of Illinois; and a member of the summer session law faculty of Columbia University (1919, 1920), the University of Colorado (1922), and Stanford University (1923). In November 1923 he undertook the task of directing the "Restatement of the Law of Agency" for the American Law Institute. Without neglecting his heavy teaching program, he worked continuously on this project. It was a gigantic undertaking and he had hoped to be able to complete it, but he was taken suddenly ill and died of influenza before the work was finished.
Mechem was internationally known as an authority on agency, partnership, sales, and corporations, and his published treatises and his numerous articles in law reviews illustrate the precision of his writing and his broad conception of legal problems. Any writing to him included the labored exhaustion of all the contributory subject matter, and his citations were strengthened by his intimate knowledge of the allied cases. The portion of the world of knowledge he had made his own lay in his mind in orderly array.
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Mechem's basic political outlook was occasionally reflected in his teaching to the great advantage of his students, who were coming to maturity during a period when contemporary thought was submerging the individual for the "social good" without pointing out that this, like everything else, costs something.
Mechem's conviction that the more important ultimate values were individual, not social, served to warn students of the half-truth of contemporary thought which all but completely lost sight of the individual. Nor was his view on this matter the result of an uninformed conservatism; it was a thoughtfully developed philosophy.
One of his outstanding characteristics was his complete independence of thought, his habit of reëxamining for himself opinions however confidently they might be entertained even by those whose judgment the most respected. He was wont to say that although almost everybody's believing a thing may not create a presumption of its being false, it certainly does not prevent its being so.
Mechem was married to Jessie Collier, December 4, 1884, and they had two sons.
11 July 1810 - 7 August 1888
1833 - 27 October 1911
5 August 1868 - 18 May 1900
1864 - 3 March 1929
18 December 1860 - 17 January 1933
14 July 1856 - 18 August 1927
27 April 1856 - 12 June 1943
12 December 1892 - March 1969
