Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus Abram Chayes '43 died Sunday from complications of pancreatic cancer. He was 77.

Chayes, who served as a leading legal adviser to the Kennedy administration, taught at Harvard Law School (HLS) for more than four decades.

"Abram Chayes was one of the dominant figures in international law teaching and scholarship over the last third of a century," said HLS Dean Robert C. Clark.

After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1943, where he lived in Eliot House, Chayes served with the U.S. army in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II.

After the war, Chayes enrolled in HLS, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review and won the Fay Diploma, an award given to the student with the highest overall average in three years of study.

Soon after his graduation, Chayes served as a clerk to then Associate Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Chayes joined the HLS faculty as an assistant professor in 1955 and become a full professor in 1958.

He then worked as an adviser to the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy '40. When Kennedy was elected, Chayes moved to Washington, where he was the legal adviser to the State Department. In that role, Chayes worked closely to develop the administration's response to the 1961 Berlin crisis, as well as the Cuban missile crisis.