Peter Murray was born in 1943 and is an authority in the fields of evidence, comparative law, trial advocacy, comparative civil procedure, and admiralty law. He started his education at Harvard College, where he studied from 1961 to 1964 and obtained an A.B degree in German.
In 1964 he began his law studies at the Harvard Law School and graduated in 1967 with an LL.B. degree. After graduation, Murray worked internationally as a lawyer in the law firms Pierce/Atwood/Scribner and Allen & McKusick up to 1973. In 1978, he co-founded the Portland law firm known as Murray, Plumb & Murray, along with Peter Plumb and Steven Murray (not related). His career with this law firm spanned 20 years. In 1993, he decided to found his own law office in which he worked up until 2005.
In addition to Murray’s principal law practice, he engaged in many other professional activities. He served as secretary to the Maine Judicial Council from 1969 to 1978 and has been a consultant to the Maine Advisory Committee on Rules of Evidence since 1973. Murray was the Edward R. Jonston Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School in 1980 and the Robert Braucher visiting professor from 1995 to 2010. From January to December 1992, Murray was a visiting associate professor at the University of Maine, School of Law, and from November 1999 to June 2003, he was a visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen. Further, he was a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany seven times between 1998 and 2011. Murray is a member of different legal associations, such as International Association of Procedural Law, Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung für Internationales Verfahrensrecht, American Law Institute, American Bar Association, Maine State Bar Association, Maine Trial Lawyers Association, Cumberland County Bar Association and Fullbright Association.
His major publications are: The Civil Notary, Neutral Lawyer for the Situation (with Rolf Stürmer) 2010; Law in the United States, 2nd Edition (with Arthur von Meuren), Cambridge University Press, 2007; German Civil Justice (with Rolf Stürmer), Carolina Academic Press, 2004; Problems, Cases and Materials on Evidence, 3rd Edition (with Eric D. Green and Charles R. Nesson), Aspen 2000; Maine Evidence, 6th Edition, Maine Law Book Company 2008