Melville M. Bigelow
American lawyer
Melville Madison Bigelow (August 2, 1846 – May 4, 1921) was an American legal academic who wrote influential books and papers on legal history, and served as dean of Boston University School of Law from 1902 to 1911.
Early life, education, and career
Born in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, the son of William Enos Bigelow, a Methodist minister, and Daphne Florence (Madison) Bigelow, of the Madison family of Virginia, Bigelow attended public schools in Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan, receiving an A.B. degree in 1866, an LL.B. in 1868, and an A.M. in 1871. He gained admission to the bar in Tennessee in 1868, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1870 to pursue a career as a legal scholar rather than as a practicing attorney.
Academic career
Bigelow participated in planning the establishment of the Boston University School of Law, helping prepare the report recommending its creation before joining its original faculty in 1872. Before his death nearly fifty years later, he noted that he had lectured to every graduating class since the school's founding.
Initially lecturing on estoppel, he later taught torts, bills and notes, and insurance. While teaching at Boston University, Bigelow completed a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University in 1879. In 1889, The Green Bag described him as being known throughout the United States and England for his legal writings, with his treatise on torts having been adopted as a textbook by the University of Cambridge, and praised him as "one of the finest law lecturers in America".
Bigelow twice declined deanship offers from other law schools, but in 1902, he succeeded Samuel Bennett at Boston University as dean of the law school. In that position he expanded the curriculum by strengthening existing subjects and adding new courses taught by additional faculty.
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This entry incorporates text from “Melville M. Bigelow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.