Morris Leo Cohen

Morris Cohen, a director of four leading law libraries, a professor, and one of the nation’s foremost legal bibliographers, died on December 18, 2010. He earned his B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1947, his J.D. from Columbia University Law School in 1951, and his M.L.S. from the Pratt Institute School of Library Service in 1959. He received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia in 1989. Morris Cohen practiced law from 1951 to 1958 before embarking on a long career in legal education. His scholarship helped shape the way legal research is taught. He retired from Yale Law School, where he was a professor of law and director of the law library, in 1991. His six-volume Bibliography of Early American Law (1998) identifies all law books published in America before 1860. He also co-authored a number of textbooks including Legal Research in a Nutshell, first published in 1968 and now in its tenth edition. He was the first person to win the Joseph L. Andrews Bibliographical Award from the American Association of Law Libraries twice, the first time for his bibliography of early American law and the second for A Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States (1995), co-authored with Sharon H. O’Connor. He also taught a course on rare law books and manuscripts at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. A rare book collector, he donated his unique collection of law-related children’s books to the Yale Law Library in 2008. AAS members attending the 2011 semiannual meeting in New Haven had an opportunity to see a selection of those books in the Paskus-Danziger Rare Books Room. His son, Daniel A. Cohen, is also an AAS member.