author
Samuel Williston
1861–1963
A towering figure in American contract law, this Harvard professor spent decades shaping the way lawyers and judges understood sales and contracts. His writing proved so durable that his name remained a standard reference in legal education long after his own era.
1 Audiobook
Commercial Law
by Richard D. (Richard Dudley) Currier, Richard William Hill, Samuel Williston
About the author
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1861, Samuel Williston became one of the most influential American legal scholars of the twentieth century. He studied at Harvard, later joined the Harvard Law School faculty, and built a reputation for unusually clear, systematic writing on private law.
Williston is best remembered for his major treatises on contracts and sales, especially The Law of Contracts, works that helped define how generations of lawyers approached those subjects. Early in his career he also worked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray, and he later contributed to important efforts to organize and restate American law.
He lived an exceptionally long life, dying in 1963 at the age of 101. Even many years after his death, his name remained closely linked with the study of contract law, a sign of how deeply his scholarship shaped American legal thought.