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.

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 …

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!

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.

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 …

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.