Background

William Draper Lewis, of Quaker background, was born on April 27, 1867 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Henry Lewis and Fannie Hannah (Wilson) Lewis.

Education

Lewis was educated at Germantown Academy and then attended Haverford College, graduating with a B. S. in 1888. Three years later he received both a law degree and a Ph. D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with Simon N. Patten.

Career

Lewis lectured in economics at Haverford from 1890 to 1896, and in 1891 was an instructor in legal history at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1896 he joined the department of law at the university, becoming dean of the school and professor of law before he had reached the age of thirty. He was chosen for the job, he recalled much later, because he was "perhaps the only lawyer then living who would take it and agree to give his whole time to it. " Despite warnings from lawyers that teaching law was best considered not a profession but a hobby, Lewis did not hesitate to join the growing number who taught law full time, using the case system originally developed at Harvard. Between 1892 and 1895 he worked as an editor of the American Law Register.

Although busy with administration and teaching, he was also an energetic scholar. Having written Our Sheep and the Tariff (1890) and The Federal Power Over Commerce (1892) before joining the law school, he turned out a variety of publications during his years as dean, including his own edition of Blackstone's Commentaries (1897); casebooks on such topics as interference in trade and equity jurisdiction; and an eight-volume collection of essays on Great American Lawyers (1907 - 1909), which included a study by him of John Marshall. With George Wharton Pepper he prepared a twenty-three-volume Digest of Decisions and Encyclopaedia of Pennsylvania Law, 1754-1898 (1898 - 1906).

In 1914 Lewis resigned as dean of the law school (but remained ten more years as a professor) to run for governor of Pennsylvania on the Progressive ticket. The experience was an unhappy one, as his candidacy proved weak; after a two-hour talk at Oyster Bay with Theodore Roosevelt, he was persuaded to withdraw in favor of fusion behind an independent Democrat. Nevertheless, Lewis' zest for reformist politics was undiminished. An organizer of the Progressive movement in his own state, he had been chairman of the platform committee at the national Progressive party convention in 1912, where he had contributed to the confusion of the gathering by misreading a key section in the party's industrial plank. He served in the same capacity at the 1916 convention. Three years later he tried to summarize and reassert the spirit of the movement in a highly partisan, but generally well-received, Life of Theodore Roosevelt, for which he was able to persuade William Howard Taft to supply a substantial, if somewhat ambiguous, introduction.

In 1923 he left the law school at Pennsylvania to direct a new organization that he had done much to found, the American Law Institute. The institute had been conceived by a committee of distinguished lawyers, judges, and scholars, including John W. Davis, George W. Wickersham, Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo, and Roscoe Pound. Lewis, secretary of the committee, had recruited its chairman, Elihu Root, whom he had come to know while they worked together drafting minimum requirements for admission to the bar for the American Bar Association. Alarmed by growing dissatisfaction in the country over the administration of justice, the sponsors of the institute hoped to establish a juristic center for the improvement of American law, in accordance with a proposal advanced in 1921 by the Association of American Law Schools. Their particular goal was to combine the resources of all branches of the profession to produce a massive restatement of the common law, a critical summary and evaluation of the state of legal doctrine under different topical headings. Prepared by reporters and committees of experts, the restatement was expected to remedy the two defects of American law that most disturbed Lewis and his colleagues, its uncertainty and its complexity. As his friend George Pepper recalled, once founded, the American Law Institute was largely "the expression of the personality of one man. " According to Cardozo, Lewis' "tact and wisdom and self-sacrificing industry" were crucial to its success. Backed by the Carnegie Corporation, eventually to a total of almost $2. 5 million, the institute completed its first restatement in 1944. Nine broad topics were covered, ranging from contracts, which in 1932 was the first to be finished, to property, which was the last. In all, the restatement ran to twenty-four volumes and more than seventeen thousand pages. From the beginning Cardozo had interpreted the very existence of the institute as proof that laissez-faire in law was on the wane. By 1944, there were few who would doubt the validity of his claim. Three years after completion of the first restatement, Lewis resigned as director of the institute.

He died at his summer home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, after a long illness. Even as he approached eighty, he retained the vigor and sense of adventure that marked his Bull Moose years. In 1946, as chairman of the institute's Committee on Essential Human Rights, he proclaimed the possibility of accord with the Soviet Union and expressed respect for that country's achievements on behalf of human welfare.

Achievements

• Under Lewis' leadership the law school at Pennsylvania flourished. He had raised enough money to move the school out of the old criminal court buildings in Independence Square and into its own facility, integrated with the rest of the university. Lewis also arranged for the law school to take over the American Law Register. He was also one of the founders of the American Law Institute.

Works

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  • The life of Theodore Roosevelt Volume 2

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Miscellaneous writings of the late Hon. Joseph P. Bradley : ... and a review of his "judicial record," by William Draper Lewis ... and an account of ... opinions," by the late A. Q. Keasbey ...

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The life of Theodore Roosevelt Volume 1

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Interference in trade: a collection of cases on strikes, boycotts, etc., with notes.

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

  • The Modern American Cases Arising Out of Trade and Labor Disputes (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Modern American Cases Arising Out of Tra...)

  • Our Sheep and the Tariff

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Great American Lawyers: The Lives and Influence of Judges and Lawyers Who Have Acquired Permanent National Reputation, and Have Developed the ... in America, Vol. 5 (Classic Reprint)

    (From a photograph taken during the period of his leadersh...)

  • American Law Register for February, 1907, Vol. 55, No.2. Can the United States by Treaty Confer on Japanese Residents in California the Right to Attend the Public Schools?

    ( About the Book Legal history is the study of how law ha...)

  • Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, With Notes Selected from the Editions...4 Vols.

    (Originally published: Philadelphia: Geo. T. Bisel Co., 19...)

  • Equity Jurisdiction, Waste and Nuisance: A Collection of Cases With Notes 1907

    (Originally published in 1907. This volume from the Cornel...)

Politics

While in politics, among the causes Lewis advocated at one time or another were a constitutional amendment to abolish child labor, establishment of a coal commission to enforce price and wage levels, and public health insurance. It was, therefore, not surprising that Lewis responded to the crisis of the depression by making a full and explicit commitment to the New Deal. In October 1932, the old Bull Mooser announced his support of Franklin Roosevelt, calling him "a broad-minded Progressive" and ridiculing Hoover's "delusion" that prosperity was near. As one who had predicted forty years previously that the remaining duties of state governments would soon be transferred to Washington, there was little in the New Deal to alarm Lewis. Unlike most leaders of the legal profession, he was even enthusiastic about Roosevelt's court-packing proposals of 1937, perhaps likening them in his mind to the earlier Roosevelt's call for recall of judicial decisions, which he had also favored. Testifying before Congress in March of 1937, Lewis argued that court-packing was essentially conservative, since it responded to a justifiable resentment against the Supreme Court's attack on needed social legislation and thus would prevent "radical and regrettable" action.

Views

Quotations: "Since Caesar, perhaps, no one has attained among crowding duties and great responsibilities such high proficiency in so many separate fields of human activity. "

Personality

Lewis was reassuringly fallible, often awkward in oral presentation, and apt to mix metaphors and mispronounce words. He was well suited to bringing about what some regarded as the main achievement of the institute, an atmosphere of trust between avowedly pragmatic men of affairs and their academic brethren in the law schools. It appears there was a sincerity and simplicity about "Uncle Billy, " as his students had referred to him, that was disarming.

Connections

On June 22, 1892, Lewis married Caroline Mary Cope; they had three children.

Father:

Henry Lewis

Mother:

Fannie Hannah (Wilson) Lewis

Spouse:

Caroline Mary Cope

References

• Affectionately, Father: the Personal Letters of William Draper Lewis 1867-1949