University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

When I teach Civil Procedure (our first-year course on lawsuits), I ask students to read an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." This tends to surprise most of them, but what Eliot recommends for aspiring poets is also important for aspiring lawyers—they should develop a "historical sense" that "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."

I know of no better resource for developing this "historical sense" than the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law.