Morris L. Cohen

Morris Leo Cohen (November 2, 1927 – December 18, 2010) was an American attorney who left the practice of law to become a law librarian and professor of law at the University at Buffalo, 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 about the history of law and helped organize and computerize the law libraries at Harvard and Yale. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago in 1947 and was awarded a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1951. He donated his "Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection" to the Yale Law Library in 2009, a collection he had started decades earlier that included early publications related to juvenile law. His 1968 book Legal Research in a Nutshell was released in nine editions, the most recent in 2007. Other works he wrote or co-authored include Law and Science, A Selective Bibliography, How to Find the Law (1983), Finding the Law (1989), Law: The Art of Justice (1992), A Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court (1995), Bench and Bar: Great Legal Caricatures from Vanity Fair (1997) and Joseph Story and the Encyclopædia Britannica (2006).

A resident of New Haven, Connecticut, Cohen died at the age of 83 of leukemia on December 18, 2010, at his home there.