Background

Walter Wheeler Cook was born on June 4, 1873 in Columbus, Ohio, United States. The second of three children and younger son, Cook grew up with an understanding of science and an addiction to rigorous thought. His father, Ezekiel Hanson Cook, born in Maine of early Pilgrim stock and a graduate of Bowdoin College, was a teacher of mathematics and a school principal. His mother, Clara Wing (Coburn) Cook, also from an early American family, taught French and worked closely with her husband in the schools he headed.

Education

Walter Wheeler Cook attended public schools in Columbus and two of the schools his father successively headed: the State Normal and Preparatory Training School in Potsdam, New York, and the Rutgers College Preparatory School. He began his undergraduate work at Rutgers, but transferred after a year to Columbia College, from which he received his A. B. degree in 1894.

He took up the study of law and political science. He received the Master of Arts degree in 1899 and the Master of Laws degree in 1901.

Career

Cook became an assistant in mathematics at Columbia and continued to study mathematical physics there and, for two years (1895 - 97), in Germany, under a John Lyndall Fellowship awarded by Columbia. While abroad, however, he abandoned his study of physics, because of a belief then current that the discipline was a closed one which did not lend itself to further imaginative contributions,

Cook became an instructor in jurisprudence and political science at the University of Nebraska, where he served with Roscoe Pound, the chief American proponent of sociological jurisprudence. He remained there until 1904, having become professor of law after two years. He then became professor of law at, successively, the University of Missouri (1904 - 06), University of Wisconsin (1906 - 10), University of Chicago (1910-16), Yale (1916 - 19), Columbia (1919 - 22), and again Yale (1922 - 28).

Meanwhile, in published articles commencing in the second decade of the century, Cook had been helping to shape the philosophy of legal realism. This philosophy, which drew heavily on the pioneering thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , stresses the importance, in the growth and application of law, of social data and of the complexities of individual fact situations, as distinguished from the extrapolation of legal doctrine. Accordingly, a central task of legal statesmanship is continuously to ascertain and act upon relevant facts in developing and criticizing legal doctrines in relation to societal goals. Cook's part in the evolution of this view was his emphasis on the importance of modern scientific method for the fact-gathering and evaluating process and his insistence on the tentativeness of scientific and therefore of legal generalizations. He also stressed the importance of rigorous logical processes in the analysis and application of legal rules, and in this respect carried forward, as did Albert Kocourek at Northwestern University, the thought of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, whose tenure at Yale overlapped Cook's by two years. By bringing these ideas and methods to bear in several volumes of teaching material and numerous articles on specific topics in professional journals, in addition to his more theoretical writings, Cook made important contributions in the particular areas of conflict of laws, procedure, and equity.

At both Columbia and Yale, Cook was in close touch with other legal scholars and educators, including Underhill Moore at Columbia and Karl N. Llewellyn at Yale, whose thought paralleled his and who engaged in conscious efforts to reform American legal education and research. Among those at Columbia were Herman Oliphant, Hessel E. Yntema, and the economist Leon C. Marshall; in 1928 these three became, with Cook, the original faculty of a new Institute of Law at the Johns Hopkins University. As visiting professor there from 1926 to 1928, Cook had aided in formulating plans for the institute. The university had no law school; the functions of the new unit were to engage in legal research and to train a small number of scholars in research methods. The institute published path-breaking statistical studies of trial-court proceedings, but was discontinued in 1933 because of the impact of the depression.

Cook's teaching, emphatic and colorful, was highly effective. In the classroom and in discussion he delighted in exposing weaknesses in the thought of those with whom he disagreed. His radical theories placed him naturally in opposition to conservative university administrations and to traditionalists in law schools and the legal profession, whose views and policies he sought to displace. Hence antagonism developed between him and some of those under whom he worked. Cook urged his ideas with single-minded intensity, orally and in writing, on every possible occasion, often conveying them to judges and other leading professional figures for comment.

In 1934-35, following the termination of the Institute of Law at Johns Hopkins, Cook served as the salaried general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, of which he had been a charter member and president, 1931-33. He had earlier been president of the Association of American Law Schools, in 1915-16, and of the national law school honor society, the Order of the Coif, 1926-29. In 1935 he returned to teaching at Northwestern University, where he remained as professor of law until his retirement in 1943. He died that fall of a heart ailment at the age of seventy, in a hospital in Tupper Lake, New York, near his summer home.

Achievements

• He was one of the chief formulators of the school of jurisprudential thought known as legal realism, a philosophy closely related to sociological jurisprudence. His contribution to legal realism was an enduring and pervasive influence on legal thought, for this jurisprudential school affected legal education and the philosophy of judges and lawyers in the United States to an increasing extent during the middle decades of the twentieth century and, later, elsewhere in the world.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Cases and other authorities on equity: selected from decisions of English and American courts. Volume 2 of 3

    (The Making of the Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 ...)

  • Cases and other authorities on equity: selected from decisions of English and American courts. Volume 1 of 3

    (The Making of the Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 ...)

  • Municipal corporations

    (This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)

  • Fundamental legal conceptions as applied in judicial reasoning: and other legal essays

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Personality

Cook was not instinctively outgoing. Some who knew him best detected a basic shyness which limited his close associations and may have generated a compensating self-regard and aggressiveness. He was, nevertheless, unfailingly courteous in his correspondence and published writings, and his personal and family relations were warm. He had a strong faith in freedom, discussion, and democratic processes, especially within the academic profession.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I hope that I may live to read your prospective book even though the perusal should crush me. I always am glad of anything that brings a letter from you". (Mr. Justice Holmes)

Connections

On November 14, 1899, Cook had married Helen Newman of Washington, D. C. They had four daughters: Helen Coburn, Dorothy Newman, Edith Newman, and Mary Newman. On September 23, 1931, following his first wife's death, he married Elizabeth Stabler Iddings of Baltimore, who survived him.

Father:

Ezekiel Hanson Cook

teacher

Mother:

Clara Wing (Coburn) Cook

Spouse:

Helen Newman

Spouse:

Elizabeth Stabler Iddings

Daughter:

Dorothy Newman

Daughter:

Edith Newman

Daughter:

Mary Newman

Daughter:

Helen Coburn