John Chipman Gray

Gray, John Chipman (14 July 1839-25 Feb. 1915), legal scholar, was born in Brighton, Massachusetts, the son of Horace Gray, a merchant, and Sarah Russell Gardner. The member of a distinguished Massachusetts family, Gray followed his elder half brother, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, to Harvard, receiving an undergraduate degree in 1859 and a law degree in 1861. He studied for a third year at the law school and received his A.M. Gray was admitted to practice in 1862 but immediately volunteered for service in the Union army. He served in various staff positions, attaining the rank of major and judge advocate general of U.S. Volunteers in the Department of the South.

After the war Gray returned to Boston and began the practice of law in partnership with law school classmate John C. Ropes, founding the firm of Ropes & Gray. In addition to practicing law together, the two also assisted in founding the American Law Review in 1866. They edited the Review until 1870, when they yielded the duty to Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) and Arthur G. Sedgwick. In 1869, while continuing to practice law, Gray was appointed lecturer at the Harvard Law School. In 1873 he married Anna Lyman Mason; they had at least one child.

Gray's teaching career began the year before Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell revolutionized the teaching of law at Harvard (and elsewhere) by introducing the case method and Socratic dialogue. At first, Gray resisted the innovations, preferring, like many neophytes, the certainty of well-rehearsed lectures, but later he embraced Langdell's system with the enthusiasm of a convert. Although without a particular specialty when he was hired, Gray eventually settled in property law, when the retirement of Professor Emory Washburn in 1876 created a need in that area. In 1875 Gray was named to the newly created Story Professorship and in 1883 was transferred to the Royall Professorship, the school's oldest and most prestigious position. Although he refused several offers of appointment to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Gray continued--with the permission of the Law School--to engage in the active practice of law with his firm, an exception to the full-time commitment Langdell's system normally required.

Gray's first book, Restraints on the Alienation of Property (1883), was prompted by his vehement disagreement with the Supreme Court decision in Nichols v. Eaton (1876), which upheld a "spendthrift trust," an arrangement by which property is placed in trust for a beneficiary but made immune from creditors. The device, which involves withholding from the beneficiary the power to alienate, encumber, or pledge the principal or income, was ideally suited to protect family fortunes from improvident heirs. The book failed to reverse judicial acceptance of this type of trust. By relentless argument, however, it powerfully reinforced the older ideal of unrestricted ownership, whereby wealth was available for productive investment but also exposed to the claims of creditors. In 1895 Gray produced a second edition; an unrepentant preface denounced "paternalism," which he described as "the fundamental essence alike of spendthrift trusts and of socialism." In fact, the two were at odds, trusts being used to safeguard the accumulated wealth of capitalists.

Gray's second book, The Rule against Perpetuities (1886), concerned limitations on the power of a disposer of property to guide its transmission from generation to generation. By postponing the vesting of unrestricted ownership, such power would also have helped to insulate the estate from the risk of loss due to spendthrift heirs. Despite ancient antecedents, the rule against perpetuities had not been formulated until the eighteenth century. Gray's self-assigned task was to produce a "model text-book" on the subject, one that would bring the rule's expression to "logical symmetry." The book succeeded, and courts in England as well as in the United States made it a standard reference. He produced two further editions in his own lifetime (1906, 1915), and his son Roland brought out a fourth edition in 1942. Also of great influence was Gray's Select Cases and Other Authorities on the Law of Property (6 vols., 1888-1892), a pioneering casebook that brought Langdell's method to the teaching of property law. Through a series of tightly linked successors, which were also produced by Harvard Law School professors, it shaped pedagogy in the field until the late twentieth century.

At age seventy Gray fulfilled a lifelong goal by publishing a book on jurisprudence, The Nature and Sources of Law (1909; 2d ed. by Roland Gray, 1921). Based on the Carpentier Lectures that he had delivered at Columbia Law School in 1908, the work remains of interest for the dogged honesty and simplicity with which it handles the enduring problems of legal analysis. While the book encouraged the kind of rigorous logicism later brought to near perfection by Wesley Hohfeld, one of Gray's student assistants, its constant concern with practical reality also suggested the development that Karl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, and other scholars were later to call "legal realism." Gray died in Boston.

Bibliography

Gray's correspondence during the Civil War, along with that of his law partner, has been edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, War Letters, 1862-65, of John Chipman Gray and John Codman Ropes (1927). Gray's mature faith in the case method and Socratic dialogue is cogently set forth in "The Methods of Legal Education," Yale Law Journal 1 (1892): 159-61. A biographical sketch by his son and many reprinted tributes are in Roland Gray, John Chipman Gray (1917). A summary of his life and work by several of his colleagues at the Harvard Law School is in Harvard Law Review 28 (1915): 539-49.

John V. Orth

Back to the top

Citation:

John V. Orth. "Gray, John Chipman";

http://www.anb.org/articles/11/11-00348.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 15:10:15 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

John Chipman Gray (July 14, 1839 – February 25, 1915) was an American scholar of property law and professor at Harvard Law School. He also founded the law firm Ropes & Gray, with law partner John Codman Ropes. He was half-brother to U.S. Supreme Court justice Horace Gray.

Early life[edit]

Gray was a graduate of Boston Latin School. From there, he went on to Harvard University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1859, and Harvard Law School, where he earned his law degree in 1861. He was admitted to the bar in 1862, and thereafter served a tour in the Union Army in the American Civil War.

Legal career[edit]

In 1865, after the end of the Civil War, Gray established his law practice in Boston, Massachusetts, which would eventually evolve into the modern firm of Ropes and Gray. In 1869, he began teaching at Harvard Law School, first as a lecturer, and became a full professor in 1875. In 1883, he was named Royall Professor of Law (a chair named for Isaac Royall, Jr.), a position he would hold for 20 years. He received honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Yale University in 1894, and from Harvard in 1895.

Two years after retiring from teaching, he died at Boston, Massachusetts on February 25, 1915.

Works written by Gray[edit]

Gray wrote two books on future interests, Restraints on the Alienation of Property (1883), and The Rule against Perpetuities (1886). His best known work is his survey of the common law, The Nature and Sources of the Law (1909). Gray's writings were so influential that they are still used in American law schools and cited in law journals to this day. (Wikipedia)