Harison received his Columbia degrees in the same years as John Jay, and they each received an LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh, 1792. He was Secretary of the Regents of New York State, 1784-1790; vestryman, warden, and comptroller of Trinity Church, 1783, 1788-1827, where he is buried; Delegate to the New York Constitutional Convention; Member, New York Assembly, 1788-1789; Trustee, Columbia College, 1788-1829; U.S. District Attorney for New York State, appointed by George Washington, 1789-1801; Recorder, New York City, 1798-1801. His second wife, Frances, was daughter of George Ludlow, jurist and loyalist, and niece of Daniel Ludlow, merchant and banker.

The correspondence consists of letters from Richard Harison to his wife, Frances, 1790-1794, from his trips to Albany and one to Philadelphia. There seem to be periodic meetings with various well-known legal figures including Egbert Benson, Josiah Ogden Hoffman, Abraham Ten Broeck, Morgan Lewis, and William North, who are mentioned in the letters. Two letters from Princeton and Philadelphia, Jan.-Feb. 1794, have interesting reference to Citizen Genet. Of his wife's letters to him, from New York, sixteen were while he was in Poughkeepsie at the Constitutional Convention in 1788, and three letters, 1783-1784, were sent to him in New Jersey while she was attending to family affairs in New York during his exile from the city. The manuscripts include his commonplace book, entitled "Extracts from various authors, upon several subjects," [after 1763]-1781, and ten genealogical and biographical records from his family papers.