He is considered the founder of art law as a field of legal study in the United States.
Because both of them had previously been divorced, their marriage led to his dismissal from the faculty of the Catholic Santa Clara University School of Law.
[9] In 1968 and 1969 he was a Fulbright scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law.
While there, he wrote The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Western Europe and Latin America, which was published in 1969.
The lecture series on "Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts" led in 1979 to the publication of a casebook with the same name, which ran to five editions through 2007.
[4] In 2000, the Mark di Suvero sculpture The Sieve of Eratosthenes was donated to Stanford Law School in honor of Merryman's 80th birthday.
[4] Merryman favored a global free market in art, and was known for his controversial position that the United Kingdom had a valid claim to the Elgin Marbles, which he laid out in an article in 1985.