Chicago Unbound

Scholarship

Wilber G. Katz was a nationally-recognized authority in corporate law, accounting, and church-state relations. He authored numerous articles on matters of corporate finance and served as the editor of annotations to the Illinois Corporation Act. He co-authored the text Accounting in Law Practice (1932) with Willard J. Graham. Katz contributed to texts on law and religion such as Religion in America (Cogley ed., 1958); Religion in American Life (Smith and Jamison eds., 1961); and Religion, Morality and Law (Harding ed., 1956). A leading Episcopal layman, Katz gave the Julius Rosenthal Foundation Lectures on Religion and American Constitutions at Northwestern University in 1963.

Katz taught courses in Corporations, Accounting and the Law, Legal Ethics, and the Law of Religious Freedom. When lauding Katz as “the best teacher I ever experienced” future colleague Harry Kalven noted: “He was at his utter best in his own course in corporations, for which he had developed his own set of teaching materials and into which he had built, really as a pioneer, a substantial dose of accounting.” ["Wilber G. Katz - the Gentle Exemplar," Wisconsin Law Review, 954 (1972)] He was popular among the students for the rigorous yet congenial atmosphere of his classroom and for the exciting, fast-paced nature of the discussions he led there.