Kaplan, Benjamin, 1911-2010

Benjamin Kaplan was born in New York City on April 9, 1911. He graduated from Clinton DeWitt High School in 1925, from City College of New York in 1929, and from Columbia Law School in 1933. After completing his law degree, he entered private practice with the firm Greenbaum, Wolff and Earnst, where he remained until 1942, when he joined the army, drafting procurement contracts. In 1943, Kaplan became part of the group of military lawyers (headed by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson) who drafted the indictments at Nuremberg. He arrived at Harvard in 1947 as a visiting professor and remained at the school for twenty five years, until being appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1972. After reaching the mandatory age of retirement from the bench in 1983, Kaplan served as a recall judge for the Massachusetts Court of Appeals. In addition to his work as a professor and a judge, Kaplan also published numerous works, both individually and in collaboration with others. He is best known for his casebook on civil procedure, published with Professor Robert H. Field in 1953, and for An Unhurried View of Copyright (1967) , which grew out of a series of eponymously lectures he delivered at Columbia University the previous year. Kaplan died in Cambridge, Mass., on August 18, 2010.