Paul Drennan Cravath
American lawyer (1861–1940)
Paul Drennan Cravath (July 14, 1861 – July 1, 1940) was an American corporate lawyer and presiding partner of the New York law firm known today as Cravath, Swaine & Moore. At the firm, he devised and implemented the Cravath System, which has come to define the structure and practice of most large American firms.
Cravath was a leader in the American Atlanticist movement and was a founding member and director of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Early life and education
Cravath was born on July 14, 1861 in Berlin Heights, Ohio. His mother, Ruth Anna Jackson, was a Pennsylvania Quaker, and his father was Erastus Milo Cravath, a descendant of French Huguenots, Congregationalist minister, abolitionist, and co-founder and president of Fisk University. After the American Civil War, the family briefly relocated to Brooklyn, where Paul enrolled at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. When his family visited Europe, he enrolled in boarding school in Geneva and toured Germany with this father.
Cravath graduated from Oberlin College in 1882, where he was considered both "brilliant" and a prankster. Oberlin later awarded him an honorary A.M. degree in 1887.
After graduation, Cravath embarked on the study of law in Minneapolis but was interrupted after three months when he contracted typhoid fever.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7150372. VIAF identifies the subject as 66357954. The Library of Congress control number is nr95017540. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1861, 1940, 1882 and 1887.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Drennan Cravath” 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.