XII

By the luck that seems to have come my way at crucial times, the year in which I started work in Boston, 1936, marked the beginning of a new administration at the law school of the then private University of Buffalo. It had been a locally oriented school run by practitioners. Samuel Capen, president of the university, wanted to create a full-time, scholarly, national school. He turned to Francis Shea, a Harvard Law School graduate and former New Deal administrator in Puerto Rico. Dean Shea, a Frankfurter protégé, had recruited Louis Jaffe, who had preceded me as Brandeis's law clerk, and Ernest Brown, who had clerked for a federal appeals court judge; through Frankfurter's recommendation Howe and I were invited to join the group the following year. We encouraged one another to accept. When I told my friends on the Harvard Law faculty that I was planning to go to Buffalo, several of them warned me that I would ruin my career and added that if I wanted to teach law, they would try to find something for me at Harvard Law School. (They were wrong about the careers of all four of us; the other three—Jaffe, Brown, and Howe—became professors at Harvard Law School after World War II.) The fact that Buffalo was in no fashion a major law school made it more attractive to me because I would not be beginning my teaching in the highly competitive atmosphere of a national law school.

Moreover, for Evelyn and me the city of Buffalo had its own appeal. We were aware of our having been bounded by the northeastern "province" of the country, interrupted by transatlantic experience. Buffalo's primarily industrial character, with its large, not yet mobile Polish population, the whole city heavily Catholic, invited our restless curiosity.