John Henry Merryman

John Henry Merryman (February 25, 1920 – August 3, 2015) was an American legal scholar known for his work in comparative law and art law. He was remembered as "one of the most influential academics in the field of art and law." He was the author of approximately 25 books and 200 scholarly articles.

Merryman was a professor at Stanford Law School where he held the Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professorship of Law. He is considered the founder of art law as a field of legal study in the United States. The author of various texts on the civil law tradition, including The Civil Law Tradition, he was the country's foremost expert on that legal tradition.

Personal life and education

Merryman was born February 25, 1920 in Portland, Oregon. He studied at the University of Portland, first in music and then in chemistry, earning his bachelor's degree in 1943. He subsequently earned a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame, and began but did not finish a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago. He subsequently taught undergraduate chemistry at Notre Dame, where he began his legal studies.

Merryman was married to Nancy Edwards from 1953 until her death in 2013. Because both of them had previously been divorced, their marriage led to his dismissal from the faculty of the Catholic Santa Clara University School of Law.

While in Italy in 1962, Merryman met with Italian professors of law. With Mauro Cappelletti of the University of Florence and Joseph Perillo of Fordham University, he wrote the work The Italian Legal System: An Introduction, which was finally published in 1967. John T. Noonan Jr. described it as a "crisp and penetrating study".

In 1968 and 1969 he was a Fulbright scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law. While there, he wrote The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Western Europe and Latin America, which was published in 1969.

In 1985 Merryman received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of law.

In 1986 Merryman retired from active teaching, becoming an emeritus professor. Even after his retirement he continued to give lectures on the topic of art theft, continuing until the spring of 2015.