Daniel R. Coquillette

The author of On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century (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, Daniel R. Coquillette is the J. Donald Monan, S.J. University Professor at Boston College and the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History, Harvard Law School and teaches at writes 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 faculty of the Boston University Law School, Cornell Law School and Harvard Law School, and became 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 1985-1993, and was named J. Donald Monan, S.J. University Professor at Boston College in 1996, and Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard in 2008.

Among his many activities, Professor Coquillette was an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s Restatement on Law Governing the Legal Profession, and a member of the Harvard University Overseers’ Committee to Visit Harvard Law School.  For five years, he was Chairman of the Massachusetts Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics and Chairman 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 of Legal History, the Massachusetts Task Force on Model Rules of Professional Conduct and 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 Reporter 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.