Herbert Packer

Professor Herbert Packer, of Stanford Law School, began gathering these research materials on the Second Circuit in order to write a history of the court. His research was cut short by his death in 1972 and Professor Michael Smith of Berkeley Law School took up the project. Professor Smith was not able to complete the book before his death in 2009. The reasearch project received support from the William Nelson Crowmell Foundation, presumably from 1967 to 1973, as indicated by the files in the collection. Professor Herbert Leslie Packer, 1925-1972, was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, 1956-1972. He had received his B.A. (1944) and LL.B. (1949) from Yale. During his career, Packer published four books: The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding, The State of Research in Anti-Trust Law, and New Directions in Legal Education. Professor Michael E. Smith, 1935-2009, spent his career as a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, joining the faculty in 1967. He had one brief respite from teaching in 1976-1977 when he served as Chief Ftaff Counsel to the U. S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. Smith received his B.A. (1956) from Haverford College, his M.A. in government (1963) from Harvard University, and his J.D. (1964) from the University of Michigan. Smith also returned to school later in his life, earning another M.A. (1982) in moral theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Through the course of his research on the Second Circuit, Smith published three articles on the subject: "Judge Charles E. Clark and the Rules of Civil Procedure," "How Liberated Was Judge Jerome Frank?," and "Justice on Appeal."

From the guide to the Research materials on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1910-1972, (Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University.)