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Faculty Profile
The Michigan Alumnus 319
In his ninth floor office high above the Gothic splendor of the Law Quadrangle, one of Mich igan's youngest full professors, William B. Harvey, contemplates the vast reaches of the law.
Neither an extreme specialist nor a dilletante, Prof. Harvey likes to probe deeply, but doesn't like to stay in a rut. He has taught or written on contracts and con tract remedies, anti-lynch legis lation, insurance, rights of resi dents near airports, criminal pro cedure and evidence problems.
Prof. Harvey was born in Greenville, S.C., in 1922, and remained in the South through un dergraduate school at Wake For est, where he received an A.B. in English in 1943. His plans to go on for a Ph.D. in philosophy had to be modified when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served as a lieutenant with the amphibious forces at Normandy and in various areas of the Pacific.
No doubt his academic and naval careers had much to do with the fact that he speaks with taut precision, hitting every idea right on the head with the first blow—and without the faintest trace of a Southern accent.
The years since the war have been tightly packed. Even before getting his J.D. from The Univer sity of Michigan in 1949, he was a lecturer in law in the School of Business Administration. Upon graduation he joined the law firm of Hogan and Hartson in Wash ington, D.C., where he concen trated on federal tax cases and taught on the side at George Washington University. Having completed his stint of practical law work, he joined the Michigan faculty as Assistant Professor and Admissions Officer of the Law School and went through a rapid series of promotions until in 1957, at the age of 34, he became a full professor.
Though all this has been ac complished with remarkable dispatch, he has not kept his nose to one grindstone. With Prof. John P. Dawson of Harvard he has authored a widely used text, Cases On Contracts And Contract Rem edies.
But it looks as if Prof. Harvey is about to settle down, intellectu ally, to a sustained—and fascinat ing—philosophical study. As he explains it, most instruction in "jurisprudence" — the traditional term for general, systematic thinking about law—has been de voted to analyzing the terms and concepts of the existing legal sys tems. Too little attention has been given to the study of value judgments in the legal order, how they are made and implemented by legal techniques.
Now, Prof. Harvey concedes that all legal studies ought to be as scientifically oriented as pos sible, that the facts of what actu ally happens in legal activity ought to be meticulously deter mined and arranged in meaning ful patterns—no easy task, to be sure. But at that point most legal scholars lapse into silence, giving little attention to bases for evalu ating, making ethical judgments of the law itself. Prof. Harvey, however, feels that this barrier of silence must be broken and that legal philosophers must go be yond legal positivism to probe in to the moral implications and con sequences of any given legal system.
Toward that end he has chosen to study the development of law in the new independent African state of Ghana. During this com ing summer he plans to travel through Ghana, laying out the basis for an empirical study of the dominant value positions ex- pressed by its leaders and re flected in its laws.
After gathering empirical data in the summer of 1961, he plans to spend the academic year 1961- 62 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before following up his researches in Ghana in the summer of 1962. He hopes the study will throw light on the ethical bases of this devel oping legal order.