Morris L. Cohen

Morris Leo Cohen lived from November 2, 1927 to December 18, 2010 and was an American attorney who left the practice of law to become a law librarian and professor of law at the University at Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Law School and Yale Law School. Described by The New York Times as one of the nation's most influential legal librarians, he wrote extensively on the history of law and helped organize and computerize the law libraries at Harvard and Yale. Born in the Bronx, he earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago in 1947 and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1951; when firms refused to hire him for labor law work over his ties to left-wing organizations, he practiced law with his uncle before earning a Master of Library Science at the Pratt Institute and turning to law librarianship, serving as Yale Law School's law librarian from 1981 and as a lecturer there from 1991.