Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as “possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century. Chafee’s avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him “dangerous” to America. Chafee was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 7, 1885, to a political family descended from Roger Williams. His father, Zechariah Chafee (Sr.), was long affiliated with Brown University. Chafee’s nephew was United States Senator John Chafee, a former Governor of Rhode Island and U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and his grandnephew Lincoln Chafee is a former Governor of Rhode Island and former U.S. Senator.

Chafee attended Brown, where he was a fellow. After graduating from Brown in 1907, he studied law at Harvard University. He was influenced by the theories of sociological jurisprudence presented by Roscoe Pound and others at Harvard. He met Harold J. Laski, a political scientist and the later Chairman of the British Labour Party, who became a lifelong friend. Chafee married Bess Frank Searle in 1912 and had four children. He practiced at the law firm of Tillinghast & Collins from 1913 to 1916. Chafee joined Harvard Law School as an assistant professor in 1916 and was promoted to full professor in 1919. He was appointed Langdell Professor of Law in 1938 and a university professor in 1950. He remained at Harvard Law School until 1956.

Chafee was an authority on equity, interpleader, negotiable instruments, and unfair business competition. In 1936, Chafee drafted the Federal Interpleader Act of 1936; he considered this his foremost professional accomplishment. He became an expert on congressional apportionment and helped apportion seats in the United States House of Representatives based on the 1930, 1940, and 1950 censuses.

In 1920, he was one of twelve lawyers reporting on illegal activities of the Department of Justice. Chafee nearly lost his job in 1921. He was brought before the Harvard Board of Overseers on a radicalism charge for questioning the sentence handed down in Abrams v. United States 250 U.S. 616(1919). He defended himself eloquently before a special committee in the Harvard Club of Boston and was allowed to remain at the law school.

Chafee was a consultant to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission), for which he co-authored a report on lawlessness in law enforcement in 1931. Chafee wrote several significant works on civil liberties. Freedom of speech was his first established modern First Amendment theory. Chafee was inspired by the United States’ suppression of radical speech and ideas during the First World War to edit and update a collection of several of his journal articles addressing significant World War I cases, including those of Emma Goldman. In 1941, Chafee revised and reissued Freedom of Speech as Free Speech in the United States, which became a leading treatise on First Amendment law. His writing influenced Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, whose jurisprudence established the First Amendment as a significant source of civil liberties. Chafee continued to champion civil rights throughout the 1930s and 1940s as a member of the American Bar Association’s Bill of Rights Committee. From 1943 to 1947, he served as vice-chairman of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Chafee advocated for international human rights and served as a representative on the United Nations Subcommission on Freedom of Information and the Press. He was a United States delegate to the 1948 United Nations Conference on Freedom of Information and the Press. From 1956-1957, Chafee was a Lowell Television Lecturer on WGBH. He completed a 16-lecture television series, “The Constitution and Human Rights,” an adaptation of a general education course he developed in 1950.

Chafee wrote several works about civil liberties, including:

• Free Speech (1920)

• Free Speech in the United States, 1941 (expanded edition of Freedom of Speech)

• Government and Mass Communications, 1947

• The Blessings of Liberty, 1956

Chafee received the following honorary degrees: Doctor of Law from St. John’s University in 1936; Brown University in 1937; University of Chicago in 1953; Doctor of Civil Law from Boston University in 1941; and Doctor of Letters from Colby College in 1944. He was a Fellow at Brown University and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Bar Association, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Alpha Delta Phi, Phi Beta Kappa, the Harvard Club of Boston, the Tavern Club (of Boston), and the Century Association).

He died on February 8, 1957. Chaffee was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2003.

For additional reading:

• Chafee, Zechariah (1950). “The Free and the Brave: A Letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee on the Mundt-Nixon Bill”. HathiTrust Digital Library. New York City, New York: American Civil Liberties Union.

• Zechariah Chafee (1964). Free Speech in the United States (6th print ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

• Zechariah Chafee Jr. and Erika S. Chadbourn. The Zecharia Chafee Jr. Papers (Jan. 1987) (American Legal Manuscripts from the Harvard Law School Library; microform)

• Griswold, Erwin N. (1957). “Zechariah Chafee Jr”. Harvard Law Review. 70 (8). The Harvard Law Review Association: 1337–1340. JSTOR 1337592.

• Hindman, Elizabeth Blanks (1992). “First Amendment Theories and Press Responsibility: The Work of Zechariah Chafee, Thomas Emerson, Vincent Blasi, and Edwin Baker.