Three faculty members -- two Law School professors and a scholar of French literature -- recently were named to endowed chairs by vote of the Yale Corporation.
Robert W. Gordon was voted the Fred A. Johntson Professor of Law and James Q. Whitman was named the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, while Denis Hollier was appointed the Augustus R. Street Professor of French. Their appointments are effective immediately. Robert W. Gordon
Robert W. Gordon is an expert in the field of legal history, among other specialty areas. He also teaches and undertakes research in such areas as contracts, administrative law, legislation, corporations, free speech and the first amendment, and occupational health and safety regulation. He has authored dozens of articles and essays and has contributed chapters to several books on the law. "The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.," which he edited, was published in 1992, and he has several works in progress, including a book on the uses of history in legal argument and another on the ideology and practices of the New York City corporate bar 1880- 1920.
Professor Gordon's past experience includes working as a reporter for both the Louisville Courier-Journal and Newsweek and as a staff member at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Center for the Study of Public Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also served in the U.S. Army, 3rd Infantry Division 1964-65.
Professor Gordon earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1967. After receiving his law degree from Harvard in 1971 and serving on the staff of the Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts that same year, he focused on teaching. He taught in the law schools at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University before coming to Yale last year.
A member of several professional organizations, Professor Gordon currently serves on the Task Force on Ethics of the American Bar Association Litigation Section , and on the board of editors of the journals Law and History Review and the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. He was director of the American Society for Legal History 1984-87, and has been director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers. James Q. Whitman
Fluent in more than half a dozen languages -- including German, French and Latin -- James Q. Whitman focuses his work on European legal history and Roman law, in addition to other legal fields. His teaching and research specialties include bankruptcy, conflict of laws and contracts. His book "The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era: Historical Vision and Legal Change" was published in 1990, and he is the author of numerous journal articles.
A 1980 graduate of Yale College and 1988 graduate of the Law School, Professor Whitman served 1988-89 as law clerk to Judge Ralph K. Winter of the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. In 1989 he joined the Stanford University faculty as assistant professor of law, and was promoted to associate professor in 1992. He left Stanford in 1994 to return to Yale as professor of law.
In addition to his degrees from Yale, Professor Whitman received a master's degree from Columbia University in European history in 1982 and a Ph.D. in intellectual history from the University of Chicago in 1987. He has held fellowships at Georg-August- Universitat, Gottingen, the Yale Law School and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall. Last fall he served as visiting professor of law at Harvard University, and in June he will travel to Paris, France, as visiting professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Professor Whitman's professional memberships include the American Society for Legal History and the American Roman Law Society. He is on the editorial board of the journal Law and History Review and is a manuscript referee for the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of Modern History and the University of Georgia Press. At Yale he chaired the Law School's First Term Committee and the Doctoral Fellows Committee 1994-95. Denis Hollier
Denis Hollier focuses his teaching and research on 19th- and 20th-century French literature, literature and politics, theories of the novel and of the avant-garde, and the history of literature. Since 1973, when he earned his doctorate at Paris X, Professor Hollier has authored or coauthored more than four dozen publications. They include the books "La prise de la Concorde. Essais sur Georges Bataille," published in 1974 and translated in English in 1989 by MIT Press as "Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille; "Le college de sociologie 1937-1939 ," "Politique de la prose. Jean- Paul Sartre et l'an guarante," "A New History of French Literature" and, most recently, "Epreuves d'artists," published earlier this year. He has also written numerous articles and reviews.
Professor Hollier has chaired the French department since 1991. He rejoined the Yale faculty in 1987, after first teaching at the University 1973-74. From 1974 to 1987, he served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the French Academy in Rome 1971-73, and at CPR Paris 1970-71. From 1965 to 1970 he was on the faculty of the Lycee Honore-de-Balzac and College Sainte-Barbe, Paris.
Among Professor Hollier's honors are two U.C.B. Humanities Council Fellowships, awarded in 1978 and 1986; a 1981-82 Guggenheim Fellowship; and a 1986-87 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He was named a member of l'Academie des secrets, Blois, in 1992, and in 1993 was recognized for his scholarly contribution by the Prix de la fondation France-Amerique. In 1990, Professor Hollier was among the contributors to the book "A New History of French Literature" who were selected to receive the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Professor Hollier served as the book's general editor.