Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 26, 2001

Volume 30, Number 8

John H. Langbein

Legal scholar John Langbein
is named Sterling Professor

John H. Langbein, the newly named Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History, specializes in trust and estate law, pension and employee benefit law, Anglo-American and European legal history, and modern comparative law.

He has written extensively in all of these subject areas. His books include "Pension and Employee Benefit Law" (with Bruce Wolk), which is the principal course book on pension and employee benefit law in American law schools; "The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination: Its Origins and Development"; "Comparative Criminal Procedure" (part of the American Casebook Series); "Torture and Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime"; and "Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France," which was awarded Cambridge University's Yorke Prize. Langbein has also compiled (with Bruce Wolk) seven editions of "Selected Statutes on Trusts and Estates," including the most recent 2001 edition. Another book, "The Lawyers Capture the Trial: The Eighteenth-Century Origins of Procedure in England" is forthcoming.

In some of his more recent work, Langbein has directed attention to the relationship of trust and contract law and to the prevalence of commercial trusts in modern trust practice. He has been active in law reform work in trusts and estates, serving since 1984 as a Uniform Law Commissioner under gubernatorial appointments from Illinois and Connecticut. He has been the reporter and principal drafter of several uniform acts, including the Uniform Prudent Investor Act (1994), which governs fiduciary investment in most states. Since 1985 he has sat on the Joint Editorial Board for the Uniform Trust and Estates Acts, and from 1991 to 1997 he chaired the Uniform Law Commission's probate and trust division. He has been commissioner of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws since 1984. He is a current member of the drafting committees of the Uniform Trust Code and the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act, and is a member of the Connecticut Law Revision Commission's Probate Advisory Committee. Since 1984 he has also been a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Private International Law, Study Groups on Trusts and Decedents' Estates.

Langbein has appeared frequently on national television programs as a critic of American criminal and civil procedure. He believes that the European style of nonadversarial justice is more fair, accurate and economical than American procedures. He has written a series of historical monographs on the origins of the Anglo-American adversary system of criminal procedure, and, in books and articles, has contrasted modern Anglo-American civil and criminal procedure with Continental practice.

A graduate of Columbia University, ,Langbein studied law and legal history for seven years in England, Germany and the United States. He earned his law degree from Harvard Law School and received a degree in English law with first class honors from Cambridge University (Trinity Hall). He also earned a Ph.D. in legal history from Cambridge.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 1990 as the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, Langbein taught for nearly two decades at the University of Chicago, where he was named the Max Pam Professor of American Foreign Law. He has also held academic appointments at Stanford and Oxford universities, the University of Michigan and the Max Planck Institutes in Frankfurt and Freiberg, Germany. He was
a visiting professor at Yale Law School 1989-90.

The legal scholar is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the Academy of European Private Law, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Comparative Study of Law, the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, the International Academy of Comparative Law, the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law, the International Association of Penal Law and the International Commission for the History of Representative Parliamentary Institutions, among others. He is listed in "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Law" and "Who's Who in American Education."

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Campus Notes