LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

     John Henry Merryman transformed American comparative law in three ways. First, his 1967 co-authored The Italian Legal System extended the serious study of foreign law beyond that of France and Germany. He presented Italian law as a series of styles and argued that its rules and institutional structure were more typical of the civil law than those of either France or Germany. Second, his 1969 primer, The Civil Law Tradition, now translated into several foreign languages, extended a cultural perspective to American comparative law for Europe and Latin America that is now commonplace. Third, he complemented this with a throughly empirical, non-rule based focus for comparative law as the study of law and society in Law and Social Change in Mediterranean Europe and Latin America (1979) and synthesized these varied approaches in teaching materials as Comparative Law: Western European and Latin American Legal Systems (1978). In the 1980s these ideas were extended to Asian and Islamic law in the innovative Law in Radically Different Cultures. John Merryman, a director of the Society and editor of the Journal from 1963 until 1992, has remained active in comparative law, which he shares with his interest in art and cultural property. His cultural and empirical perspectives are apparent in his 1994 coursebook, The Civil Law Tradition: Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, and 1999 compendium of his articles, The Loneliness of the Comparative Lawyer.

     In 1970, the Italian Government awarded John Merryman its Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (Cavaliere ufficiale). He has received three doctorate degrees honorus causae: Aix-en-Provence, 1982; Trieste, 1989; and Rome (Tor Vergata), 1999. Finally, he has been presented with two Festschriften. The first was published by Duncker & Humblot (Berlin, 1990, 450 pp.): Comparative and Private International Law: Essays in Honor of John Henry Merryman on His Seventieth Birthday. The second was the product of a conference held at Stanford University honoring him and his perspectives on comparative law: Legal Culture in the Age of Globalization: Latin America and Latin Europe (Stanford Univ. Press, 2003, 528 pp.). This latter volume has already been translated into Spanish and published in Mexico by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

     David S. Clark presented this Award at the Society's annual dinner in Ann Arbor, Michigan.