Myres S. McDougal

Who was Myres S. McDougal?

Myres S. McDougal was a professor at the Yale Law School for fifty years. He also taught at New York Law School. Born in Burton Mississippi on November 23, 1906, he died on May 7, 1998.

He received undergraduate and LL.B. degrees from the University of Mississippi, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, from which he received a B.C.L. in 1930, and received a J.S.D. from Yale in 1931. He began teaching property law at Yale in 1934. During World War II he served as assistant general counsel of the US Lend-Lease Administration in 1942 and general counsel of the US State Department’s Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations. After the war he returned to the Yale Law School and achieved recognized distinction in the field of international law. Professor McDougal served on the US delegation to the 1969 UN conference in Vienna that produced the Convention on the Law of Treaties. Second Circuit Judge José A. Cabranes said of him, "Myres McDougal was, without a doubt, the greatest international lawyer of his time."

Professor McDougal's books included:

⁕The law school of the future: From legal realism to policy science in the world community

⁕Property, wealth, land: Allocation, planning and development; selected cases and other materials on the law of real property, an introduction