Arthur Linton Corbin was an American lawyer and legal scholar who was a professor at Yale Law School.
13 Facts About Arthur Corbin
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Arthur Corbin contributed to the development of the philosophy of law known as legal realism and wrote one of the most celebrated legal treatises of the 20th century, Corbin on Contracts.
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Arthur Corbin graduated from the University of Kansas in 1894 and briefly taught high school in Augusta, Kansas, and Lawrence, Kansas.
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Arthur Corbin returned to Yale Law School in 1903 to serve as an instructor in contract law.
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Arthur Corbin became a full professor at Yale Law School in 1909, a position he would hold until his retirement from teaching in 1943.
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Arthur Corbin convinced the administration to hire more full-time professors and adopt more selective admission criteria, and he helped to implement and popularize the casebook method of legal study created by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard Law School.
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Arthur Corbin was a founder of the American Law Institute and the first reporter of the Restatement of Contracts.
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Arthur Corbin subscribed to the philosophy of legal realism, the idea that law was the product of human efforts and society.
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Arthur Corbin believed that in resolving contract disputes, judges should examine not just the "four corners" of the legal document itself, but the intention of the parties, as evidenced by the course of dealing and course of performance between the parties, as well as the customs of the trade and business community.
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Arthur Corbin felt that the main purpose of a contract was to protect the reasonable expectations of each party.
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Arthur Corbin's views are frequently contrasted with those of Harvard contracts scholar Samuel Williston, who was more of a formalist in his thinking.
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Williston served as the reporter for the First Restatement of Contracts, but Arthur Corbin's contributions were more evident in the Restatement of Contracts, which he worked on until his retirement from legal study at age 90, due to failing eyesight.
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Arthur Corbin's portrait is in the Yale Law School collection.