Law Commons^™

Tribute To R. Kent Greenawalt: A Common-Law Thinker In A Text Driven Age, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

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 studies that divided its attention between common law case analysis and statutory interpretation; Kent’s nuanced understanding of both profoundly shaped my approach to each. In the doctoral program, he offered a graduate seminar on jurisprudence; my responsibility was for a seminar on legal education. Sharing these …

Robert Ferguson: A Man For All Seasons, Brett Dignam

Faculty Scholarship

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 (most recently) correspondents from prison – to articulate our thoughts. He listened to and scrutinized the words of others with impeccable care.

In Memoriam: Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

I must confess that I don’t read law reviews. Of course, I read law review articles, in the course of judicial research and keeping in touch with academic literature in areas of my scholarly interest, but like most judges and lawyers, I don’t have time or interest to just pick up the latest issue of a law review and read it through. I do, however, regularly read the quarterly Ballet Review, a quasi-scholarly journal of reviews and articles about dance. Only once, in some twenty years of reading that publication, has it overlapped my legal interests. The Fall …

Jack Greenberg: Living Greatly In The Law, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

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 of heroism, may wear his heart out after the unattainable.”

Holmes set a high standard for greatness. It was not enough for him that a lawyer succeed in “the greedy watch for clients and practice of shopkeepers’ arts,” but rather he …

Harvey Goldschmid: The Scholar As Realistic Reformer, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Harvey Goldschmid was a Renaissance Man – extraordinary teacher, farsighted public servant, skillful negotiator, and corporate statesman. But sometimes, less attention is given to his career as a legal scholar. Here too, however, his work has had impact and will last.

In Memoriam – Marvin A. Chirelstein, Barbara Aronstein Black, Stephen B. Cohen, Michael J. Graetz, Roberta Romano, Carol Sanger, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Marvin Chirelstein was my good friend long before he was my colleague, and Ellen is one of my closest friends-it's a friendship that's lasted through oh! so many ups and downs for all of us for oh! so many years. As a sign of how good a friend I considered Marvin, I will report that he is the only person I have ever permitted to call me Babs!

Tributes To Kent Greenawalt, Barbara Aronstein Black, Vincent A. Blasi, Elizabeth F. Emens, H. Jefferson Powell, Susan P. Sturm, William F. Young

Faculty Scholarship

There are some tasks that present themselves as, at the same time, an opportunity and a challenge. Crafting a brief tribute to Kent Greenawalt is just such a task. It is first – and I should say foremost – an opportunity to express in a public forum one’s high regard for an esteemed colleague and valued friend, and, then, it is a challenge to do justice to his extraordinary accomplishments, to the man, and to his work.

In dedicating this issue to Kent, the Columbia Law Review honors one of its own, whose association with Columbia Law School and the …

A Personal Note, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

It's a pleasure to introduce this issue honoring Columbia's most lovable curmudgeon. What can I say about the Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Law? I should acknowledge, at the start, Henry's profound intellectual contribution to Columbia and to the law. There are not many of us who can say, with justification, that we've written the Greatest Hits of Public Law Scholarship over the course of our careers. And few of us have made individual contributions that equal "Constitutional Common Law," "Marbury and the Administrative State," "We the People[s]," "Stare Decisis," or "The Constitution Goes to Harvard." Henry is unusual among …

Allan Farnsworth, Ali Reporter, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

For my five years as Dean of Columbia Law School, I only occasion-ally worked with Professor Farnsworth. He was not a faculty member who needed the Dean's help or wanted the Dean's attention. But once he came to my office, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, to share the news that on that day, the recorded number of citations to Farnsworth on Contracts had moved into first place among all legal publications, displacing Williston.

Remembering Oscar Schachter, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

In this issue of the Columbia Law Review and also in the pages of journals that specialize in international and transnational law,' my colleagues and I celebrate the professional accomplishments of Oscar Schachter as a superlative scholar and public servant, as well as his qualities as a human being. Here, I will speak mainly in the personal rather than professional voice. One of the reasons I want to reminisce rather than eulogize is the very impossibility of putting the proper frame on the superlatives.

William Warren, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Don Rapson, then graduating from Columbia Law School and preferring not to be a foot-soldier in Korea, went to Dean Warren. The Dean said: "Go to General X in the Pentagon, tell him I sent you, and he will hire you as an Army lawyer." Don went to the Pentagon (it was probably easier to stroll in fifty years ago). The General said: "I never heard of Dean Warren." But after a lively talk Don was hired and supplied good professional service to his country.

Milton Handler: Teacher, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

I did not know Milton Handler until he was eighty-eight years old.Of course I knew of him. I had lived near the world of Philip Areeda and Steve Breyer, antitrust experts who knew very well that Milton had begun the study of competition law; had been in that founding generation of activist law scholars who implemented the realist vision by expanding the canon of common law courses – contracts, torts, property – to statutory and regulatory fields such as taxation, regulated industries, labor law, and corporations.

William J. Brennan, Jr., American – In Memoriam, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

At Justice Brennan's funeral, President Clinton spoke of the justice's enormous impact on our country's law-thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, over 1300 opinions authored, many of them landmarks: Baker v. Carr, opening the way to one person, one vote; Craig v. Boren, wielding the Equal Protection Clause to strike down discrimination on the basis of sex; Goldberg v. Kelly, insisting on the right of the poorest citizens of the administrative state to be heard in the face of an arbitrary bureaucracy; New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, articulating the modem rationale for a free press; …