David Farquhar Cavers Papers

David Cavers was born in Buffalo, New York in 1903. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1923 and from Harvard Law School in 1926. After practicing law in New York City, he taught at Duke Law School from 1932-1943, leaving to join the Office of Price Administration in Washington. His gift for plain English in rewriting myriad regulations came to be known as "Caverizing." In the 1930s, while teaching law at Duke University, Cavers founded Law and Contemporary, the first quarterly publication in the country to devote each issue to legal aspects of public problems. As a teacher at Harvard Law School from 1946-1969, and the school's associate dean from 1951-1958, Cavers was a catalyst in expanding the international legal studies program, in starting an international tax program in cooperation with the United Nations, and in establishing legal research programs for jurists from Israel and Japan. A professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, Cavers specialized in conflicts between laws of different jurisdictions. After retiring, he collected five decades of his writing into Choice of Law: Selected Essays 1933-1963, which was published in 1985. David Cavers died in Cambridge, MA on March 4, 1988, at the age of 85.