Robert Kratovil

(1910-1989)
Illinois

Robert Kratovil was born May 21, 1910 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He received his LL.B. degree in 1933 from DePaul University. In 1939 he became an instructor in real estate law at the American Savings and Loan Institute. From 1947 to 1959 he was an instructor at the DePaul University College of Law. In 1959 he became chief title officer of the Chicago Title and Trust Co, and in 1962 general counsel of the Chicago Title Insurance Company.

[Source: Barbara Harte & Carolyn Riley (eds.), Contemporary Authors 658 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981)(Volume 5-8: First Revision]

Night Thoughts

How lonely are the nights since you have died,
How still the rooms that know your tread no more.
A vacant window stares at empty streets,
The darkness frames a brooding, empty door.

At times in dreams we walk a road
That seems by day a sad, remembered place.
Forever I am doomed to hear your voice
And search the empty darkness for your face.

So I do penance now for petty sins.
Remembering our days as in a spell.
Until the time when night envelops me
In that eternal darness where you dwell.

["Night Thoughts," Robert Kratovil, Evanston, Illinois, in the American Bar Association Journal, vol. 63 (1)(January, 1977), p. 148]

Musings on Rising Interest
Rates and the Re-emergence
of the Usury Problem

O, don't distrust the creditor!
He seldom is a predator.
The law cannot protect the debtor.
The market place can do it better.
And if you treat him like a canker,
You may destroy the mortgage banker.
The you make the banker neverous,
The more he charges for his service.
And when the prime rate keeps on rising,
The mortage loan's less appetizing.
O, don't distrust the creditor!
He seldom is a predator.
the law cannot protect the debtor.
The market place can do it better.

[60 A.B.A. J. 988 (1974)]

[We learned about Kratovil's association with poetry by way of J. Wesley Miller's introductory essay on "Legal Poetry" which appears in Ina Russelle Warren (ed.), The Lawyer's Alcove: Poems by the Lawyer, for the Lawyer and about the Lawyer i-xii, ix (Buffalo, New York: William S. Hein & Co., reprint ed., 1990)(New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1900)]

Writings

Robert Kratovil, Real Estate Law (Prentice-Hall, 1946)(Prentice-Hall, 1949)(Prentice-Hall, 3rd ed., 1961)(Prentice-Hall, 1965)(Prentice-Hall, 6th ed., 1974)(Prentice-Hall, 7th ed., 1979)(Prentice-Hall, 8th ed., 1983)(Prentice-Hall, 1988)(Prentice Hall, 10th ed., 1993) [Robert Kratovil & Raymond Werner, Real Estate Law (South Western College Publishing, 2001)]

____________, Modern Mortgage Law and Practice (Prentice-Hall, 1972)

____________, Modern Estate Documentation (Prentice Hall, 1975)(Prentice Hall, 1978)

Robert Kratovil & Ruth Kratovil, Buying, Owning, And Selling A Home In The 1980s (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1981)