Kent Greenawalt was my colleague and friend for half a century. Over those years, we shared responsibility both for students at the beginning of their legal studies and for candidates for the doctoral degree. The course in Legal Methods, while we each taught it, was an intensive three-week, thirty-nine class hour introduction to legal […]
In memoriam
In their sunnier moments, law professors sometimes say there is no tension between being a great teacher and being a great scholar—that they are actually complementary. There’s little strong evidence to support this claim. But they like to say it anyway. Kent Greenawalt was indeed an excellent scholar and a great teacher. But I […]
Professor Kent Greenawalt was a kind and exceedingly thoughtful man. To sketch out the life he led is to reflect on the nature of those virtues, for the traits I have mentioned were connected with one another. His thoughtfulness was conveyed in the gentlemanly quality of his personal and collegial interactions. He always cared […]
Professor Robert Ferguson enriched all of our lives. The man lived by and luxuriated in words. They are important to all of us, but they had a particularly magical significance to Robert. He chose them carefully, crafted their construction, and gloried in their rhythm. He encouraged all of us—his colleagues, students, friends, and […]
“But always, always, / A man must wait the final day, and no man / Should ever be called happy before burial.” So warns the narrator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in recounting how Cadmus founded Thebes. This dark pronouncement underscores the caprice of fate, to which Cadmus himself would fall prey. Were Robert Ferguson here, […]
Our lives are measured by the impact we have on the lives of others. We are valued when we labor not for ourselves alone, but with an eye toward building a world better than the one we have known. By that measure, Sheila was a giant. She inspired us with her vision and brightened […]
Early in 2013, in the midst of interviews conducted by several upstate bar associations reviewing candidates for a seat on the New York Court of Appeals, I sat down at lunch and met Sheila Abdus-Salaam. I was not in my element, and I’m sure she noticed that when she decided to sit next to […]
On October 12, 2016, Jack Greenberg passed into immortality. Born on December 22, 1924, during a life spanning ninety-two years he helped to change the world around him and to make it infinitely better. I have often said that Jack Greenberg had as much influence on our country through the law as any attorney […]
In 1886, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., then a Professor at Harvard Law School, gave a talk to the students of Harvard College, which included a much-quoted line: “I say—and I say no longer with any doubt—that a man may live greatly in the law . . . . [H]e may wreak himself upon life, may drink the bitter cup […]
In the fall of 1982, I was planning a month-long trip to Italy with a friend. Debby Greenberg had organized a conference on comparative affirmative action at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center that summer, and Jack and Debby traveled around Italy while there. Jack invited me and my “spousal analog”—a coinage of his own that […]