William Draper Lewis

Only four years out of law school, he had committed himself to an overwhelming smorgasbord of editorial projects, the major ones in conjunction with friend, business associate and later U.S.Development of a core of full-time faculty sat at the top of Lewis's agenda, but he gave equal attention to curriculum, admissions and graduation standards, and facilities – in particular the library.A compulsive communicator, Lewis dictated letters a dozen at a time and served as recording secretary for faculty meetings.His mailings to prospective students and their parents could run to three or four typed pages, intermixing his philosophy of education with practical concerns directed to the inquirer's situation.... [W]e reserve the right to rejoice in his split infinitives, his mixed metaphors and the strange beings with which his imagination peopled the cases discussed in his classroom.""Founding father"[6] Lewis became its first director, shaping its agenda of preparing "restatements" of the "law, as it had developed under the divergent decisions of the American courts," being, according to Judge Augustus N. Hand, "largely his own conception and it is no exaggeration to say that it was principally his faith and zeal that finally resulted in enlisting Senator Elihu Root, George W. Wickersham, James Byrne[s] and many other distinguished lawyers, as well as numerous judges and teachers of the law, in the enterprise and in obtaining the financial support for it of the Carnegie Corporation," presidential advisor Root, a Nobel Peace Laureate, was also a close advisor to Andrew Carnegie.