Charles Donahue

After graduating from Portsmouth Priory (now Abbey) School in Rhode Island, where I had the benefit of a thoroughly old-fashioned classical education, I attended Harvard College and concentrated in Classics and English. From Harvard, I went to the Yale Law School, which allowed me to spend virtually all of my third year in the Graduate School. I worked with two extraordinary legal historians, W. H. Dunham in English legal and constitutional history and Stephan Kuttner in the history of medieval canon law. A military obligation took me to Washington, where I worked for two years as an attorney-advisor in the office of the General Counsel of the Air Force and for a year as Assistant General Counsel of the President’s Commission on Postal Organization. Completion of the military obligation brought me to a crossroads, and after thinking seriously about staying in Washington in private practice, I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, with the intention, since fulfilled, of becoming a legal historian. I visited at the Harvard Law School 1978–79 and joined the faculty full-time in January of 1980.

My interests range broadly over the field of private law, but history and property seem to go together, and I taught first-year property for more than fifty years. Other than that, my teaching and research have been in the area of European legal history. I regularly offered courses in Roman law, English legal history and Continental legal history. In addition to law students, I also taught legal history to undergraduate and graduate students. My basic legal history courses were co-listed in the College, and I offered a seminar on medieval law in the History Department. In preparation for assuming emeritus status, I have cut down on my teaching. In the academic year 2025–26, I will be offering only a seminar English Legal History and the parallel seminar in the History Department.

On the research side, I have published an obscenely long book on marriage litigation in the ecclesiastical courts of England and of what I had to call the ‘Franco-Belgian’ region in the later Middle Ages. The databases on which this book was based are available on the Ames Foundation’s website. A co-authored edition of The Register of the Official of the Bishop of Ely: 21 March 1374 – 28 February 1382 is in press. The link takes you to the page proofs. I am now working on the fourteenth-century volume of the new Oxford History of the Laws of England. A complete list of my publications may be found in the Bibliography.

I am vice-president and treasurer (also chief cook and bottle-washer) of the Ames Foundation at the Law School. I serve on the Committee on Medieval Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and on the University Committee on Religion. Outside of Harvard, I am a past president of the American Society for Legal History, a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Society for Legal History, the Society of Antiquaries (UK), and the Royal Historical Society (UK); and a life member of the American Law Institute. More detail may be found in the Curriculum Vitae.

After spending much time on teaching, one sometimes wonders if it has had any affect. Confirmation comes in delightful ways. In 2016, colleagues and students presented me with a Festschrift: Texts and Contexts in Legal History: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, John Witte, Jr., Sara McDougall, and Anna di Robillant ed. (Berkeley: The Robbins Collection, 2016). In 2023, anonymous donors established a fund with the American Society of Legal History in support of its Student Research Colloquium, to be called the “Charles Donahue SRC Co-Faculty Convenors Fund,” “given in honor of Charlie’s extraordinary mentorship, from which so many have benefited over the years.” In 2024, I was presented with another Festschrift, this one edited and written entirely by former students and mentees: The Learned and Lived Law: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Saskia lettmaier, and Nikitas E. Hatzimihail, ed., Legal History Library 70 (Leiden: Brill 2025). One must conclude that I learned as much from them as they learned from me.