I am shocked and saddened to learn that beloved University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson passed away yesterday after a lengthy illness. Cribbing now from the letter by University of Iowa Law School Dean Gail Agrawal to the law school community:
A native of Cedar Rapids, Professor Bezanson earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in 1968 and his J.D. summa cum laude here at the University of Iowa College of Law in 1971. He was a star student, graduating first in his class and serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Iowa Law Review. After law school, he was as a law clerk first to the Honorable Roger Robb on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then the following year to the Honorable Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court. In 1973, Randy returned home and joined our faculty. He quickly established himself as one the nation’s leading experts on the First Amendment, libel law, and mass communications law. ...
Randy will be remembered by his colleagues for his rigorous mind, his great wit, his unyielding commitment to legal education, his deep devotion to using writing as a vehicle for sharpening students’ minds, his unfailing willingness to read and comment on colleagues’ drafts, and his instinctive questioning of unspoken assumptions. Many of those qualities were on daily display around the faculty lunch table, to which Randy invariably came with a topic worthy of careful thought and discussion. His students will remember him as a gifted and committed teacher, learned scholar, and wonderful mentor. His greatest professional pride came from his students’ achievements. Life in the Boyd Law Building will not be the same without him.
I am really shocked by this news and I hope to reflect some on what Randy's first amendment scholarship, particularly on the history of free speech, means to me sometime soon. Randy was important to us in the scholarly community for his generosity, warmth, and good humor -- even more than his scholarship. But I thought that I would illustrate this post with the dust jacket of his last book, Art and Freedom of Speech, as a tribute to some of the topics of central importance to his scholarly life. (Thanks to my friend Todd Pettys for passing along this news.)
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