OU Professor Collaborates with Students for Newly Published Book

In what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind collaboration, OU professor of classic and letters Andrew Porwancher has co-authored a major newly launched book on U.S. legal and constitutional history with three of his former undergraduate students.

The Prophet of Harvard Law draws from untouched archival sources to reveal the origins of the legal world we inhabit today. The book focuses on Harvard Law professor James Bradley Thayer, who shaped generations of students from 1874-1902. His devoted protégés included future Supreme Court justices, appellate judges and law school deans. The legal giants of the Progressive Era — Holmes, Brandeis and Hand, to name only three — came under Thayer’s tutelage in their formative years.

In 2019, Porwancher, who had always been struck by the high caliber of OU’s undergraduate students, decided to test his theory that many of them could be guided into producing original scholarship. He asked three of his students, Jake Mazeitis, Taylor Jipp and Austin Coffey, if they would join him as full-fledged coauthors on the project and they all happily agreed.

“In light of their conventionally long road to publication, it is probably difficult for the typical scholar to imagine a 21-year-old could be ready to produce work that can withstand the rigors of the publishing process,” said Porwancher. “Jake, Taylor and Austin showed that the best and brightest students at OU have the tools and talent they need to do the kind of work that’s traditionally the preserve of professors. It’s one of the great honors of my career to have my own name share a book cover with theirs.”

For the next three years, the group researched, wrote and revised together. One of the biggest challenges was creating a book with different authors who felt unified in its theme and voice. For this, Porwancher helped the former students edit their assigned portions of the manuscript to ensure the book worked in tandem.

“The most enriching part of this part of the project was how much I learned from my coauthors,” said Porwancher. “Taylor proved keenly insightful about the role of religion in civic life. Jake brilliantly captured the nuances of Thayer’s complex relationship with the iconic judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Austin impressed me with his sensitivity to how Thayer’s early years informed his philosophy of law.”

This September, the book was published by the University Press of Kansas, which is considered one of the nation’s elite publishers of legal history. Additionally, the book appeared in Kansas’s premier book series, “American Political Thought,” which is home to much of today’s cutting-edge scholarship. OU celebrated with a massively successful book launch panel where a standing room-only crowd gathered in Oklahoma Memorial Union to hear from the authors. The panel gave current students the opportunity to hear from Mazeitis, who is in his third year at Yale Law School; Jipp, who completed her graduate work at the University of Cambridge; and Coffey, who has finished his Luce Scholarship and started a position at Kissinger, Inc., in New York.

The authors now look forward to published op-eds connecting the books to current events and Porwancher hopes to work with students again in the future.

“Looking ahead, I’m enthused at the prospect of seeing Jake, Taylor and Austin branch out on their own with solo-authored projects,” said Porwancher. “They are brilliant and brimming with great ideas. Felix Frankfurter, who was a Thayer protégé featured in our book, was famous for coauthoring academic articles with a different student each year when he served on faculty at Harvard Law. I hope to continue in the Frankfurterian tradition and collaborate with more students on original research. My message to professors and students keen to try their own hand at joint authorship: hang in there for the long haul.”