Biographical Notes on Contributors

    Neal W. Allen, John Bigelow Professor of History at Union College, is a graduate of Bowdoin with a doctorate in history from Harvard, and has taught English and American constitutional and legal history for more than thirty years. He was the editor of Volumes IV and V of Maine Province and Court Records, and collaborated with the late Robert E. Moody in editing Volume VI in that series. He has been a visiting lecturer at Aberdeen University in Scotland and a fellow in law and history at the Harvard Law School.

    Thomas G. Barnes, a graduate of Harvard with a doctorate from Oxford, has since 1974 been Professor of History and Law at the University of California at Berkeley. A former Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of a number of prizes in history and in law, he has written several outstanding books on English legal history. His interest in early Massachusetts law and legal institutions is an outgrowth of his long-term research and writing on the Star Chamber, one facet of which is litigation and lawyers in the early seventeenth century.

    Barbara A. Black, a graduate of Brooklyn College, with a law degree from Columbia and a doctorate in history from Yale, has taught history at Yale and is presently Associate Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, teaching Contracts, Commercial Law, and Legal History. She has been visiting lecturer at both the Harvard and the Columbia Law Schools. Her main research interest is the adjudicative record of the General Court of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and she has written many scholarly articles.

    Robert J. Brink, a graduate of Boston University with a law degree from Northeastern, is Director of Special Projects at the Social Law Library in Boston. He also serves as Secretary and Treasurer of the Judicial Records Committee of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. From 1976 to 1981 he directed a project to conserve the colonial court files of Suffolk County—a project which has since become the official state-wide program of the Supreme Judicial Court—and has written a number of articles on subjects in his field.

    Morris L. Cohen is a graduate of the University of Chicago with a law degree from Columbia and a degree in Library Science from Pratt Institute. After several years in law practice he began a career as a law librarian and has served at Rutgers, Columbia, S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He is presently Librarian and Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. He has published a number of books and articles on legal research and has for almost twenty years been working on a comprehensive multi-volume work entitled Bibliography of Early American Law, to be published in 1985–1986.

    Daniel R. Coquillette, a graduate of Williams, went as a Fulbright Scholar to Oxford, where he studied legal history and took a law degree. On his return to this country he graduated from the Harvard Law School. He then served as law clerk to the Hon. Robert Braucher of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and later as law clerk to the Hon. Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States. He is currently a partner in the law firm of Palmer and Dodge in Boston, and has been Visiting Professor from Practice at the Harvard and the Cornell Law Schools. He is the author of a number of articles on legal history.

    John D. Cushing received his doctorate from Clark University and taught constitutional history and law at Norwich, Clark, and Boston Universities before joining the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he has been Librarian since 1963. He was the compiler of A Bibliography of the Laws and Resolves of the Massachusetts Bay, 1642–1780 and of a facsimile edition of The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 1641–1691, and is the author of several major articles on Massachusetts legal history. He was director of the Plymouth Court Record Project and has served on a number of boards concerned with the preservation of court records and the organization of archives.

    David H. Flaherty, a graduate of McGill University with a doctorate in history from Columbia, taught at Princeton and the University of Virginia before assuming his present position as Professor of History and Law at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He has been a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a fellow in law and history at the Harvard Law School. He is the author of Privacy in Colonial New England and the editor of Essays in the History of Early American Law and Essays in the History of Canadian Law (Vols. 1, 2) and has written a number of articles on early American colonial and legal history.

    George L. Haskins, a graduate of Harvard and the Harvard Law School, is currently the Algernon Sydney Biddle Professor at the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and worked for the United Nations during its early years. Today, he is widely acknowledged as the dean of American colonial legal historians. His best-known work, of many, is the classic Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and past President of the American Society for Legal History.

    Edith G. Henderson, a graduate of Swarthmore with both an LL.B. and an S.J.D. from the Harvard Law School, is currently Curator of the Treasure Room at the Harvard Law School Library. She has written and edited a number of articles and books on English legal history, including Foundations of English Administrative Law and a pending Selden Society volume.

    Michael S. Hindus has a law degree from Harvard and a doctorate in history from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at the University of Minnesota and the Stanford Law School and from 1977 to 1979 was Project Director for the Judicial Records Committee of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He is currently a practicing attorney in San Francisco. He is the author of Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 and The Files of the Massachusetts Superior Court.

    Douglas L. Jones is a graduate of Duke University with a master’s degree from the University of Texas in Austin, a doctorate from Brandeis, and a law degree from Harvard. He has been a Research Fellow at The Charles Warren Center at Harvard and has taught at Tufts. He is the author of Village and Seaport: Migration and Society in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts and has written several articles on American colonial and legal history.

    Charles R. McKirdy is a graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo with a doctorate in history from Northwestern University and a law degree from Northwestern Law School. He has taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, and the Kent Law School. He is currently a litigation partner with the law firm of Pope, Ballard, Shepard and Fowle of Chicago. He has authored several articles concerning colonial lawyers, as well as articles on substantive and procedural aspects of the law.

    Kathleen A. Major taught American History at the high-school level for five years before joining the staff of the American Antiquarian Society in 1976 as a manuscripts cataloguer. In 1979 she became Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and is now Keeper of Manuscripts.

    Catherine S. Menand received her A.B. from Vassar College and then did graduate work at Columbia. She has been a Research Fellow at Wellesley College. She is currently Chief Archivist of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Her most recent publication is “Politics, Passions and the Law: Otis v. Robinson 1769.”

    William E. Nelson, a graduate of Hamilton with a law degree from New York University and a doctorate in history from Harvard, is one of the country’s most distinguished legal scholars. He has been a law clerk to Associate Justice Byron R. White of the United States Supreme Court, a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, and has been a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale before assuming his present position as Professor of Law at New York University. He has written widely in his field, two of his most important books being The Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 and Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725–1825.

    Russell K. Osgood, a graduate of Yale and of the Yale Law School, is currently Professor of Law at the Cornell Law School. He is the editor with Lloyd Bonfield of Law and History Review, published jointly by the Cornell Law School and the American Society for Legal History. He has written several leading articles on tax law and American legal history, and is the author of a major treatise on pensions and profit sharing.

    Caroline Preston, a graduate of Dartmouth with a master’s degree from Brown, served as Archivist for the Rhode Island Historical Society before joining the staff of the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts, where she holds the position of Manuscript Librarian.