My friend Richard Gershon has passed along the news of the passing of his long-time and beloved colleague George Cochran at Ole Miss. Cribbing now a little from Professor Cochran's memorial notice,
Cochran graduated first in his class from the University of North Carolina Law School and served as Editor in Chief of the law review. He was inducted into the Order of the Coif, the premier legal honor society. He clerked for US Supreme Court justices Stanley Reed and Earl Warren, including service on the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.
Professor Cochran practiced law with Steptoe and Johnson between 1966 and 1968. That year, he and his wife Nancy Newbold Cochran welcomed his only child, daughter Reed. Though he and Nancy ultimately divorced, Cochran considered her to be his greatest love and their daughter to be his crowning accomplishment.
Cochran worked as Director of the Duke Center on Law and Poverty from 1968 until 1972, when he accepted a faculty position at the University of Mississippi of Law School. There, he found his true calling as educator and scholar.
Professor Cochran arrived in Oxford while Mississippi was still resisting the outcomes of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the legislature having expelled faculty members who supported the Supreme Court decision. As one writer has observed, "Professor Cochran joined the law faculty at a turning point. From early in his career he played an important role in transforming the law school from a parochial institution into a nationally respected" law school. He taught constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, Supreme Court practice and related seminars. For nineteen years, he also taught during the summers at Fordham Law School in New York. Also in New York, he collaborated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, considering one of its founders, Morton Stavis, to be among his greatest friends and mentors.
Altogether, Cochran was attorney of record in seventeen constitutional law cases. He and his good friend Wilbur Colom successfully challenged single sex education at Mississippi public universities in the U.S. Supreme Court. Cochran was also one of the nation's leading experts opposing punitive actions against public interest attorneys. And he was instrumental in establishing the Mississippi Innocence Project, which was renamed the George C. Cochran Innocence Project by unanimous vote of the faculty in 2015.
Comments