Brainerd Currie: Scholar

When a scholar dies and memorial editions subsequently mark the loss, the most usual convention is to honor him in a festschrift of articles that measure his influence-tracing the impact of his work and his thinking, in measurable ways, upon the remaking of an entire discipline. In Brainerd Currie's case, that ought not be neglected, because surely his seminal contributions to choice-of-law theory have had a major impact. From an original trilogy of articles written in 1957 (which with later essays were to identify him as the first recipient of the Coif award), through a powerful symbiosis with the highest courts in California and New York, Brainerd regenerated a whole new intellectual life in the then-moribund subject of conflicts of laws. Much that has happened since then has been like footnotes to his own footprints.