Legal Commentary

Erwin Nathaniel Griswold was one of the giants of American law, rising to become Dean of the Harvard Law School and Solicitor General of the United States.  Griswold Hall, at Harvard Law School, is named for him.  He was a notorious stickler for detail.  As David Remnick writes in The Bridge, "Every year until his death in 1994, Griswold ... sent frequent letters to the President [of the Harvard Law Review]-'Grizzer-grams,' they were called - lauding a good article, or, far more often, pointing out flaws of prose, reasoning, editing or timeliness."

Imagine Dean Griswold's reaction to the December 2010 issue of the Harvard Law Review, which refers to "Irwin Griswold, Dean of the Law School for twenty-one years." (p. 432)  This error appears in, of all places, Justice David Souter's 2010 Harvard Commencement Address.  Souter was a student at Harvard Law School during Griswold's deanship.

I am stunned that none of the very bright Harvard Law Review editors, who fly-speck every comma, noticed this glaring misspelling.  (Was this error in Souter's original manuscript and never verified?)  I point this out not just to make fun of a former rival (this would never have happened at the Yale Law Journal!), but also as a sober reflection on how little even the greatest legal academics are remembered after they are gone.  Sic transit gloria mundi, indeed.

The error has been fixed on the e-version of the commencement speech on the HLR website.  But "Irwin Griswold" is out there permanently in the hard copies, to the everlasting infamy of the Volume 124 editors.