author
Samuel Williston
1861–1963
A giant of American contract law, this longtime Harvard professor helped shape how generations of lawyers and judges understood private agreements. His writing was so influential that his name still turns up in legal study and practice decades after his death.
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 legal scholars in the United States. He studied at Harvard, later joined the Harvard Law School faculty, and built a reputation as a careful, systematic thinker whose work reached far beyond the classroom.
Williston is best known for his major treatise on contracts, a work that helped define the field for much of the twentieth century. He also played an important role in drafting and organizing important areas of American commercial law, and his teaching and scholarship left a lasting mark on legal education.
He lived an unusually long life, dying in 1963 at the age of 101. Even now, he is remembered less as a public celebrity than as a scholar's scholar: a writer and teacher whose clear, durable work continued to guide lawyers long after his own era had passed.