Llewellyn, Karl Nickerson b. May 22, 1893; Seattle,Washington d. February 13, 1962; Chicago, Illinois
American jurist. Llewellyn studied in Germany, taught at the University of Leipzig, and thus was enabled to introduce into American law key concepts of German civil law. He was one of the most influential American academic jurists of the twentieth century, not only as scholar and teacher, but as a codifier.
Llewellyn graduated from Yale Law School in 1918 and taught briefly there in 1919. He then spent two years in banking practice in New York City, then he returned to Yale to teach, where he remained until 1925, when he was appointed to the faculty of Columbia University School of Law. In 1951 he resigned from Columbia and moved to the University of Chicago Law School.Llewellyn’s reputation rests principally on his work in commercial law and legal philosophy. He is considered the father of both the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the legal realist movement. He began his teaching career with commercial law and contracts. His commercial law work led to his being called upon in 1940 to be principal draftsman and chief reporter of what became the Uniform Commercial Code that now governs commercial transactions throughout the United States. Beginning in the late 1920s Llewellyn also turned to issues of legal philosophy, including issues of legal process and legal methods. In this area he became renowned as the founding father of the school of legal realism. The legal realists sought to examine the law as it actually is implemented. Llewellyn was also one of the first American legal academics to work in the area of the anthropology of law.
Llewellyn’s life mirrors the decline in influence of German culture on American intellectual life. When Llewellyn was born, German influence in America was near its zenith. Llewellyn’s father, William Henry Llewellyn, was favorably impressed by the German educational system. When his son at age sixteen ran out of challenges at the Boy’s High School in Brooklyn, he sent young Karl to the Gymnasium (academic high school) in Schwerin in Mecklenburg.
Llewellyn spent three happy years there and graduated in 1911, before returning home to enter Yale College. When World War I began in 1914, Llewellyn happened to be in Paris. He quickly left for Germany and joined up with the German army. Wounded in combat, he was awarded the Iron Cross. Discharged because he would not give up his American citizenship, he returned to the United States and spent the remainder of the war as a student at Yale.As a young professor, in 1928-1929 and again in 1932, Llewellyn was visiting professor at the University of Leipzig Faculty of Law. In 1933 he published in Germany in German one of his most important jurisprudential works (Prajudizien- recht und Rechtsprechung in Amerika) which was not translated into English until 1989 (The Case Law System in America}. The Nazi dictatorship even more than World War I naturally cooled Llewellyn’s public enthusiasm for things German. When Stefan A. Riesenfeld arrived in America in flight from Nazi Germany in 1935, Llewellyn cautioned him that to identify an idea as having its origin in Continental Europe was to give it the “kiss of death” (Riesenfeld 1993, 91).
Although publicly Llewellyn avoided references to things German, privately he continued to draw on German legal science in his work in commercial law and legal philosophy. Llewellyn is the acknowledged inspirer and principal draftsman of the Uniform Commercial Code. More than any other American legislative work, it comes closest to the great Continental codifications such as the French Code Civil (Code Napoleon) and the German Burger- liches Gesetzbuch (BGB—Civil Code). Not only in form, but in many specific points, in the dark days of World War II Llewellyn drew upon this, one of the great achievements of German culture, for his work on the UCC. Although it is little recognized in
the United States, fundamental concepts in American commercial law such as “good faith” and “unconscionability” have origins in Llewellyn’s reading of the German Civil Code.
After World War II, Llewellyn sought privately to restore his ties to Germany. He followed the work of the German Federal Supreme Court and campaigned to save East German cathedrals from destruction. At the time of his death he was working on a series of lectures that he was to give in Germany that were to provide a comprehensive picture of his thought.
James R. Maxeiner
References and Further Reading
Ansaldi, Michael. “The German Llewellyn.” Brooklyn Law Review, vol. 58 (1992): 705-777.
Drobnig, Ulrich, and Manfred Rehbinder, eds. Rechtsrealismus, multi-kulturelle Gesellschaft und Handelsrecht: Karl. N. Llewellyn und seine Bedeutung heute. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994.
Hull, N. E. H. Roscoe Pound & Karl Llewellyn: Searching for an American Jurisprudence. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997.
Riesenfeld, Stefan. “The Impact of German Legal Ideas and Institutions on Legal Thought and Institutions in the United States.” The Recption of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World 1820—1920. Ed. Mathias Reimann. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993, 89-99.
Twining, William. Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1985.
Whitman, James. “Commercial Law and the American Volk: A Note on Llewellyn’s Sources for the Uniform Commercial Code.” Yale Law Journal, vol. 97 (1987): 156-175.