My Isaac Royall Legacy

Posted on Oct 29, 2010

By Janet Halley

Note to the reader: What follows is a revised version of remarks I delivered on Monday, September 17, 2006 in the Casperson Room at Harvard Law School, at the time of my appointment to the Royall Chair of Law. The portrait of the donor, Isaac Royall, reproduced here as Plate 1 and discussed below, was behind the lectern. I am very grateful to the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal for publishing this essay.

It has been a great honor to me to be appointed the next Royall Chair here at Harvard Law School and I want to extend the deepest gratitude to Dean Kagan for this event in my life. It is a particularly daunting honor because I succeed so many distinguished Royall Chairs. This seems like an opportune moment to remember their names, from the first to the most recent: Isaac Parker, John Hooker Ashmun, Simon Greenleaf, William Kent, Joel Parker, Nathaniel Holmes, James Bradley Thayer, John Chipman Gray, Joseph Henry Beale, Edmund Morris Morgan, John Mac-Arthur Maguire, Paul Abraham Freund, Archibald Cox, Benjamin Kaplan, Vern Countryman, Robert Charles Clark and David Richard Herwitz.

But there are some aspects of stepping into this position that are more strenuous, and I want to use this inaugural moment to reflect on them. I want to think hard about Isaac Royall, Jr., the founder of my chair. And before turning to this task, I want to thank Daniel Coquillette, Lester Kissel Visiting Professor of Law at HLS, and Elizabeth Kamali, our recent graduate, who have researched Isaac Royall’s life and the early history of the Law School and who have been unstintingly generous to me in providing their counsel and their beautiful files of materials, both primary and secondary. Throughout our discussions, the precision and scholarly wisdom of Elizabeth’s work showed me a powerful new legal historian in the making. I also want to thank Betsy Henthorne, David Warrington and Melinda Spitzer Johnston for providing extremely valuable information from the Law School’s archives. Especially because I have had such wonderful help, I hasten to add that all errors of fact and judgment are mine alone.

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