Fred Rodell

Who was Fred Rodell?

Fred Rodell was an American law professor most famous for his critiques of the U.S. legal profession. A professor at Yale Law School for more than forty years, Rodell was described in 1980 as the "bad boy of American legal academia".

He was one of the leading proponents of the “legal realism” approach and railed against overly abstract and theoretical legal arguments. He was a harsh critic of the legal profession, which he described as a "high-class racket." In his 1936 Virginia Law Review article "Goodbye to Law Reviews", Rodell famously remarked, "There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground.”

Rodell himself never became a member of the bar, later explaining that, “By the time I got through law school, I had decided that I never wanted to practice law. I never have.”

Rodell studied under Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas at Yale Law School They carried on a lifelong correspondence, a substantial portion of which is archived at Rodell's alma mater, Haverford College. Haverford also awarded him an honorary degree in 1973, the year he retired from Yale.