Daniel R. Coquillette

Daniel R. Coquillette, author of The Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School, The Second Century and On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century (both with Bruce Kimball), Portrait of a Patriot: The Quincy Papers (with Neil York), Lawyers and Fundamental Moral Responsibility, The Anglo-American Legal Heritage, Francis Bacon, and The Civilian Jurists of Doctor’s Commons, and editor of Law in Colonial Massachusetts, is Dean and J. Donald Monan, S.J. University Professor Emeritus at Boston College and Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School. He writes and teaches in the areas of legal history and professional responsibility.

Professor Coquillette was a law clerk for Justice Robert Braucher of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger of the Supreme Court of the United States. He taught legal ethics and legal history on the faculties of Boston University School of Law, Cornell Law School, and Harvard Law School, and was a partner for six years at the Boston law firm of Palmer & Dodge, where he specialized in complex litigation. He served as Dean of Boston College Law School from 1985 to 1993, was named J. Donald Monan, S.J. University Professor at Boston College in 1996, and became Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School in 2008.

Among his many professional activities, Professor Coquillette was an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers and a member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers Committee to Visit Harvard Law School. For five years, he served as Chair of the Massachusetts Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics and Chair of the Task Force on Unauthorized Practice of Law. He also served on the American Bar Association Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, the Board of the American Society for Legal History, the Massachusetts Task Force on the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the Massachusetts Task Force on Professionalism, and the Special Committee on Model Rules of Attorney Conduct of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. He is currently a Consultant to the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States and a Senior Editor of Moore’s Federal Practice.