Biography

Professor Richard B. Cappalli

cappalliphoto.JPG (10376 bytes)

The Temple Law School faculty has voted to award the Friel-Scanlan prize for academic year 1997-98 to Professor Richard B. Cappalli for his publication The American Common Law Method (Transnational Pubs. 1997).

This work is unusually traditional. Today, most in the legal academy are busy infiltrating law with lessons from linguistics, economics, literature, medicine, political science, and other non-legal disciplines. Cappalli worries that legal craft will be lost in this "law and ..." explosion. In an attempt to recapture and refocus on the essence of the common law tradition, he wrote The American Common Law Method. In a foreword to the work, Cappalli says it is a "fresh account" of the rules and practices constituting the doctrine of judicial precedent. Its predecessor and inspiration was a treatise on the subject written in 1894 by Professor Eugene Wambaugh of Harvard Law School.

The work is comprised of three parts. In eight chapters the opening part lays out the fundamental principles and practices of the case law system: how judicial precedents are created, interpreted and applied to new controversies. These fundamentals are drawn from some 150 classic common law writings, dating from 1832 to 1996. The names are legendary: John Austin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sir Frederick Pollock, John Chipman Gray, Roscoe Pound, Benjamin Cardozo, Max Radin, Lon Fuller, Edward Levi. Cappalli also utilizes the works of modern scholars like Robert Summers of Cornell and Frederick Schauer of Harvard, as well as the classic casebooks written at Columbia, Harvard and Pennsylvania. The writings he relied upon are reported, year by year, in an appendix to the book.

The middle part of the work studies the legal methodology deployed by Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Cappalli explores a series of cases decided by the Court between 1869 and 1991 which create the doctrine of judicial immunity. His focus is not on the doctrine but on the methodology: How the Justices craft and apply decisional law. Another appendix reproduces the cases so that the reader can make his or her own analysis of judicial techniques and compare it to Cappalli’s critique.

The final part is a series of small chapters touching major themes. In one Cappalli explores the topic of "certainty" in the case law method, reaching the conclusion that judicial precedents, crafted and applied with sound methodology, produce highly certain law and enable sound predictions of future pathways. In another Cappalli explains how the "age of statutes" has not supplanted the common law tradition because legislatures use broad phrases in their statutes, thereby calling upon courts to develop the detailed rules by case law adjudications.

Professor Cappalli’s concern about our country’s bench and bar losing the knowledge upon which the highly successful case law system was erected led to a follow-up study published as the lead article in volume 70, issue 2, of the Temple Law Review. Its discouraging title is The Disappearance of Legal Method. In this writing Cappalli documents and decries the disappearance from law school curriculums of the core Legal Method course and its replacement by politically popular themes. He also demonstrates how modern casebooks have disenabled professors from teaching, and students from learning, legal methodology because they reproduce not cases but "blurbs" from cases. This article has been instrumental at several law schools which have or will reintroduce Legal Method into their curriculums.

A third recent work by Cappalli is At the Point of Decision: The Common Law’s Advantage Over the Civil Law, 12 Temple Int’l & Comp. L.J. 87 (1998). Cappalli is fluent in Spanish and Italian and has utilized that language ability to research and write on several comparative law topics over the past decade. He has also taught at the University of Trento Law School in Italy and, as a senior Fulbright, at the University of Chile. At the Point of Decision explains and compares the fundamental differences in the way a common law judge or lawyer reasons from precedents to a conclusion in contrast to a civil law jurist working from a civil code provision.

Professor Cappalli’s interest in the topic of judicial methodology was sparked in his law school days at where he studied legal method under the renowned Harry Jones and Chief Justice Brietel of the N.Y. Court of Appeals. During his first professorship at the University of Puerto Rico, where a mixture of common and civil law is taught, he spearheaded the development of a mandatory Introduction to Law course. Shortly after his arrival at Temple in 1976 he began working with like-minded colleagues to develop and implement a legal method course. This course, now called Legal Decision-Making, has become a highly popular staple of the first year curriculum since its introduction in 1985. His twelve years of teaching this material at Temple laid the groundwork for The American Common Law Method.

Professor Richard Cappalli is the first recipient of the Temple Law School Klein Chair in Law and Government. This appointment recognized of his significant contributions to legal scholarship.

In Spring 1993 Professor Cappalli spent a sabbatical semester in Italy where he taught a seminar in Italian at the University of Trento Law School and did comparative law research at the University of Florence. His recent article, The Style and Substance of Civil Procedure Reform: Comparing the United States and Italy, is one of the products of that sabbatical.

He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1988 and spent a semester doing research and teaching in Spanish at the University of Chile Law School in Santiago, Chile. An outgrowth of this experience and his teaching comparative law in the Rome "Summer Abroad" program is his lengthy article, Comparative South American Civil Procedure, 21 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 239 (1990). He and an Italian professor co-authored Class Actions for Continental Europe? A Preliminary Inquiry, 6 Temp. Int'l & Comp. L.J. 217 (1992). His interest in comparative law stems from his earlier years as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico.

Professor Cappalli is also a national authority on the legalities of the federal grant system. He is the author of Rights and Remedies Under Federal Grants and the three-volume treatise, Federal Grants and Cooperative Agreements. The latter publication was voted "book of the year" by the research staff of the United States Supreme Court in 1982. Another recent publication, is Restoring Federalism Values in a Federal Grant System, 19 Urb. Law. 493 (1987).

Professor Cappalli has been teaching at Temple Law School since 1976. In addition to his current courses in Civil Procedure and Legal Process, he teaches Alternative Dispute Resolution and Negotiating Settlements of Civil Cases.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's Professor Cappalli was an associate at the Washington, D. C. firm of Covington & Burling. During that time he served as the United States Congress legal advisor to the Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico. He moved to Puerto Rico in 1967 where he was a professor of law at the University of Puerto Rico for nine years. From 1973 to 1976 he served on the personal staff of the Governor of Puerto Rico as Special Advisor on Federal Affairs. Additionally, he served six year on the Board of Directors of the Puerto Rico Legal Defense Fund.

Professor Cappalli holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School where he was a Ford Urban Fellow. His J.D., cum laude, was awarded by Columbia University School of Law where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review, a member of moot court, and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He is an alumnus of Williams College where he majored in English.