Onto the desks of the nation’s law schools and bar associations dropped a novel legal announcement last week. Distinguished, aging Harvard Law School Professors Joseph Henry Beale (Conflict of Laws) and Samuel Williston (Contracts) had recorded significant law lectures before the sound camera. In each film as introducer of the subject and lecturer appears Harvard Law School’s newsworthy Professor Felix Frankfurter (Administrative Law), Vienna-born intimate of President Roosevelt, sponsor of such New Deal legalights as SEChairman James McCauley Landis, 37, who returns to Cambridge as Harvard’s law dean in September. Professor Beale’s subject is “Jurisdiction for Divorce”; Professor Williston’s, “Consideration.”
Though their films are designed to perpetuate great legal personalities, and perhaps will make money, Alumni Edmund Lawrence Dorfman, 1936, and Bernard A. Reimer, 1929, failed to persuade Harvard Law School to finance the first two, hope to get their expenses back by renting the pictures to alumni and other groups. If Cinemactors Beale & Williston pay out, other films will follow. John Henry Wigmore, 74, dean emeritus of Northwestern University’s Law School is tentatively scheduled for film three. The national market for law lecture films: 160,000 lawyers, 40,000 law-students.
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