Quintin Johnstone

Quintin Johnstone (March 29, 1915 – June 27, 2014) was an American legal scholar. He served as the Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he was an authority on property law and land transactions, and was later an academic at New York Law School.

Johnstone received his undergraduate and legal education at the University of Chicago. After beginning a career in academia, he obtained additional degrees from Cornell and Yale Law School. The majority of Johnstone's tenure as a law professor was spent at Yale University, where he advocated for the teaching of property law and took an active role in recruiting international students. He was raised in Hyde Park and attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools for primary and secondary education. Professor Myres S. McDougal was his doctoral advisor at Yale.

Career After graduating from Cornell Law, Johnstone worked briefly in private practice before becoming an attorney in the Office of Price Administration. In 1947, he became an assistant professor at the Willamette University College of Law, later joining the faculty of the University of Kansas as an associate professor in 1950. After five years of teaching, Johnstone became a visiting professor at Yale Law School in 1955, with President Alfred Whitney Griswold announcing his appointment as an associate professor on August 10, 1956, alongside future-judge Ellen Ash Peters. He rose to a full-time professorship in 1959, and received the Law School's appointment as the Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor of Law in 1964.

From 1967 until 1969, Johnstone took a leave from Yale to move to Ethiopia, where he co-founded the Haile Selassie I University Law School of Addis Ababa University and served as its dean. In considering the importance of Johnstone's teaching of the essentials of law, Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. likened his and Joseph W. Bishop Jr.'s eventual retirement to being "the equivalent of a loss of 20% of the faculty" at Yale Law School.

Throughout his career, Johnstone received multiple accolades for his legal service. He was awarded an honorary degree by Quinnipiac University in 1993. In 1996, the Connecticut Bar Association awarded him its John Eldred Shields Distinguished Professional Service Award for outstanding service to the legal community. Johnstone was also a member of the Connecticut Bar Foundation's board of directors and served as its president from 1987 until 1991. On June 2, 2011, Johnstone was given the Service to the Profession Award by the Connecticut Law Tribune, where he previously had been the chair of the editorial board from 1999 to 2011, and the Tribune renamed it in his honor afterwards. in recognition of his longstanding contributions to legal education. The CATIC Foundation established two memorial prizes in his honor: the Quintin Johnstone Scholarship, presented to students interested in property law, and the Quintin Johnstone Prize in Real Property Law, awarded to a student of Yale Law "who has demonstrated excellence in the area of real property law".

Personal life and death Johnstone had a wife, Nancy, and two children: Robert Dale Johnstone and Katherine Mary Johnstone. A memorial service was held at Yale Law School on November 9, 2014. Robert Post, then the dean of the school, said of him:Quintin Johnstone was an iconic figure at the Yale Law School [...] He taught here for more than 55 years, and perhaps instructed more students than any other teacher in the School’s history. His mastery of the intricacies of property law was treasured by generations of students, as were his insights into the legal profession. He was still actively teaching at 96 years of age. We shall miss him deeply. A treasured landmark has passed away.

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