The Faculty Lounge

In Memoriam: George Johnson Jr.

The former dean of Elon Law, George Johnson Jr., passed away on Sunday.  He served as interim dean, and then permanent dean, of Elon from 2008 to 2014.   He joined the law school faculty as it welcomed its first class in 2006.   Johnson was 69.

John M. Murrin 1935-2020

John Murrin passed away.  He is professor emeritus history at Princeton University.  He was a historian of seventeenth and eighteenth century America.  Among many pieces, my favorite is Thinking America: From Empire to Republican (Oxford University Press, 2018).  He was a victim of Covid 19.  His obituary in is the Daily Princeton.

In Remembrance: Detroit Mercy Law Professor Howard B. Abrams

From an email message that I received earlier today:

Long-time Detroit Mercy Law Professor Howard B. Abrams has passed away.  He was 79.  Howard served on the Detroit Mercy Law faculty since 1977, teaching a range of courses but focused primarily on Copyright and Entertainment Law.  He was a brilliant legal thinker who thrived on intellectual life.  He was also an exceedingly decent man.  He brought gravity to every conversation, fought passionately for the interests of the law school and its students, and nurtured new faculty with good advice and kindness. The Detroit Mercy Law community will miss him greatly. 

Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019)

Noel Ignatiev has passed away—among many pieces of work my favorite How the Irish Become White.

Judith Maute

Professor Judith Maute of the University of Oklahoma has passed away.

Charles Reich (1928-2019)

Charles Reich died in San Francisco.  He was the author of The Greening of America, among many pieces.

h/t Karen Tani

Alan Brinkley

Alan Brinkley has passed away.  Columbia University has lost a very distinguished professor of history. The HNN has a memorial notice.

J. Gordon Hylton (1952-2018)

It is great saddeness, Gordon Hylton has died.  He was a great guy — and a phenomal academic career. He had a distinguished legal academy, first Chicago Kent, then to Marquette, and to University of Virginia. Dean Risa Goluboff had an observation in the Virginia Law Review.

Richard Danner

I'm sorry to report that long-time Duke law librarian Richard Danner passed away last week.  He was a tremendous resource and a leading figure in the field, especially in the move to electronic publishing.  

Camille Wright Cook

Long-time and beloved Alabama Law Professor Camille Wright Cook passed away earlier this week.  There will be a memorial service on Friday.  I have heard so many alumni talk glowingly about Professor Cook over many years.

Ben Windham

I'm very sorry to hear that long-time Tuscaloosa News columnist Ben Windham has passed away at age 68.  Ben was a real treasure for this southern university town.  I thought from the moment I first get to know him, which I guess was around 2002, that he was the classic southern journalist.    I've met over the years in Tuscaloosa and Chapel Hill a few people who seem like they've stepped out of a movie about small southern university towns.  Ben is one of them.  (My beloved colleague Tom Jones was another.)  If you called central casting and asked for a southern, sort of muck-racking journalist with some common sense, Ben is the man who'd arrive.  His mother, Kathryn Tucker Windham, was a famous Alabama story-teller and author.  She passed away in 2011.

James C. Davis (1931-2016)

Last fall I missed the passing of one of my favorite college professors, James C. Davis.  I landed in his freshman seminar, "Researching Philadelphia,"  in the fall of 1984 and that was, quite frankly, a transformative experience for me.  He took us around the city to see sites that were so often overlooked -- like nineteenth century workers' housing -- and others that were quite popular, like City Hall and Fairmont Park.  This made me realize that there was much to study and some unorthodox ways to do it.  It was my first introduction to social history and I ended up writing a history of a block of Philadelphia -- which had been part of the DuBois' study "The Philadelphia Negro" and by the early 1980s was quite affluent.  That paper, which used census records to detail the changing demographics and affluence of the block, set me on the road to other quantitative and social history projects.

Dr, Davis was a thoughtful and patient professor and looking back on the several courses I took with him I feel like he dramatically shaped my approach to history and even my desire to do more with it.  I read Montaillou, a study of a French village based on Inquisition records, in his class and that remains one of my favorite works of history, not just because of the method of using court records to tell a story that goes well beyond the legal questions that motivated the trials in the first place.  It was after I left his charge that I expanded my interested in intellectual history.  I'm very sorry that I didn't have the chance to talk with him in recent years; I would love to have had his counsel on my recent efforts to combine social and intellectual history.

Given everything that was going on in my life last fall I missed the news of his passing.

 The illustration is of Davis' book The Human Story, published by Harper Collins in 2005.

 

Susie Mead

I was sorry and surprised to learn that Susie Mead, a long-time law professor at Indiana University—Indianapolis has passed away.  I got to know Susie just a little bit when I visited with for a semester in Indianapolis, nearly two decades ago.   Susie, who was the beloved academic dean, was a great mentor to everyone in the building.  And some years later was the first woman to lead the law school when she served as interim dean.  For some reason, I learned that she was related in some way to Booth Tarkington, the early twentieth century novelist from Indianapolis.  I think it was because she realized that I was working on the 1920s and she asked what I thought of Tarkington.  I was in those days a lot closer to my once obsession with Progressive-era fictional literature, especially those midwestern writers like Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Tarkington, and it was an unexpected joy to meet one of Tarkington’s descendants.  Susie was such a special person and such a warm and generous teacher and administrator.

H/t Jeff Cooper

Perry Wallace (1948-2017)

Michael Bressman sends along the sad news that long-time American University law professor Perry Wallace has passed away.  Though people in the academy knew Wallace as a scholar of environmental and corporate law, he blazed other paths as a young man.  In 1967 he was the first African American basketball player in the SEC, when he played for Vanderbilt University, where he was an engineering student.  The Washington Post has a moving reviewing of a Andrew Maraniss'  2014 biography of Wallace, Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South.  Cribbing now a little from the review, as it discusses an away game he played in Oxford, Mississippi, at Ole Miss:

Wallace recalls people in the crowd screaming, “We’ll lynch you, boy!”

Shortly before halftime came a blow “so fast that no one knows who threw the elbow,” Maraniss writes. It drew blood, to the delight of some of the spectators. When halftime ended, Wallace was left alone in the locker room with a bag of ice and a swollen eye. He was “shaken not just by the physical blow but by the relentless taunting. . . . He could hear the Ole Miss crowd react when his teammates returned to the court without him: “Did the nigger go home? Where’s the nigger? Did he quit?”

Wallace, who had become the first black player in the Southeastern Conference two years earlier, returned to the game and helped Vanderbilt win, but no one from his team accompanied him back to the court. “He understood more clearly than ever that his journey as a pioneer was one that he would be making alone.”

Wallace was drafted by (my beloved) 76ers but he went a different path -- to Columbia Law School, where he graduated in 1975, then to Washington, DC, in the executive office of Mayor Walter Washington, then to George Washington University where he taught and served as assistant director of the Department of Experimental Programs, and then to the Department of Justice as a trial lawyer for five years.  Wallace began teaching at the University of Baltimore in 1985 and moved to American University in 1992.

The Nashville Tennessean has a lengthy obituary, which quotes from one of Professor Wallace's high school teammates on Wallace's strength and optimism: "But through it all, he said that being bitter can eat you alive. And I thought that was so noble of him, because a lot of the bitterness that he might have had during that time has subsided now. It's over and done with and he didn't allow it to change him as a person."

In Memoriam: Judge J. Dickson Phillips Jr.

With sadness, I have to report that Judge J. Dickson Phillips of the Fourth Circuit passed away on Sunday.   He was 94. I clerked for him in 1990-91 and I can't imagine having had a richer year.   Judge Phillips was as fine and kind a human being as you could hope to meet.   He had a wry sense of humor, a sharp intellect, a deliberative manner, and a passion for barbecue.   Eastern Carolina barbecue, that is.    

Judge Phillips mentored several clerks who would later become law professors, including former Cornell Dean Stewart Schwab, Mitch Berman at Penn, Theresa Newman at Duke, Gerry Leonard at BU, Janet Moore at Cincinnati, and Tom Kelley and  Melissa Saunders at UNC.  I'm sure there are other full-time and adjunct faculty whom I'm missing.  His obituary gives the details of his remarkable life so I won't repeat them here.  Suffice to say, he will be missed.  

The image is from Judge Phillip's earlier days as Dean of the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Tom Jones (1931-2017)

I am sorry to report that Tom Jones, a long-time Alabama law professor, passed away yesterday evening.  I have so many stories about Tom, who was a legendary figure in Alabama Law School history.  Tom come to Tuscaloosa in 1962, back when we were in the Farrah Building on the University's quad.  He spent his entire career here and was an important figure in law reform in the state.  He helped shepherd the Uniform Probate Code through the Alabama legislature in the early 1970s, with some key modifications, especially on the spousal elective share.  When I arrived here in 2001 Tom was extremely generous with his time in getting me oriented to the vagaries of the Alabama probate code and in getting me introduced to trust and estate lawyers here.  One of the stories that stays in my mind the most, though is that Tom said one day that he realized I'm interested in history.  Then he said, I saw Governor Wallace stand in the door.  The Farrah building backed up to Foster Auditorium (where Governor Wallace made his stand) and apparently everyone in the law school was looking out the Farrah building's back windows.  Tom saw a lot of history in this town and presided over so much change.  He was an institution around these parts, a beloved teacher who'd taught I guess just about every graduate of UA Law for nearly fifty years.  And he was the consummate gentleman; he was always around the law school, working on his law reform projects, talking to the newer faculty and the students, and tutoring primary and secondary school students.  We have lost a great person.  And I'd add that I think Tom's likes are not to be seen again soon.  He was such a special person and mentor to so many, me included.

Update: There will be a memorial service for Tom on Thursday, September 1, at 11:00 a.m., at First Presbyterian Church, 900 Greensboro Avenue, Tuscaloosa.  Visitation will follow in the Family Life Center at the church.

Thomas Haskell (1939-2017)

I'm a little behind the times on this, but I wanted to talk about Thomas Haskell's passing.  He spent most of his career as a professor at Rice University and was a fabulous scholar.  Haskell's debate with David Davis and John Ashworth on the emergence of humanitarian, anti-slavery sentiments amidst the growing market from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th century is one of the most important debates among intellectual historians of recent years.  I am very interested in the question why antislavery thought grew in conjunction with the market -- because we so often see the market as in conflict with ideas of humanity.  Haskell argued that the market led to sentiments of 

This is important for legal historians because there are other areas where the (sometimes) conflict of the market and humanitarian sentiments appear.  Legal historians will be interested in Morton Horwitz' write-up about this back in 1993. I wrote up a little bit about this at legal history blog a while back. I continue to believe that we should study how the growth of humanitarian sentiments appeared in law alongside the growth of a law that facilitated the market.  We can use the framework that Davis and Haskell debated to test what was happening in law.  For instance, I'd like to use their framework to look at the growth of trust law in the era of market revolution.  Sometimes those changes were driven by a desire to promote (or smooth the functioning of) the market; at other times, the changes were designed to limit the market.  For a long time I've thought that we should talk about how the market revolution, which brought so many positives in terms of economic growth while it also left some people behind, drove changes in law.  Doug Thie and I talk a little bit about this in the first part of our article on changes in probate in the Shenandoah Valley before the Civil War. But I want to focus a separate piece on this, on the effect of the market revolution on trust law in the pre-Civil War era down the road.

Herma Hill Kay

We share the sadness of our colleagues throughout the legal academy in the passing of iconic Berkeley Law Professor Herma Hill Kay.   Cribbing now from Berkeley Law's memorial notice:

Kay, who taught at Berkeley Law for 57 years, wrote seminal works on sex-based discrimination, family law, conflict of laws, and diversity in legal education. A powerful advocate for equality in legal education and for women’s rights under the law, she also published numerous articles and book chapters on subjects including divorce, adoption, and reproductive rights. 

In 1960, Kay became just the second woman to join the Berkeley Law faculty—hired when the first, Barbara Armstrong, announced plans to retire. During Kay’s tenure, the number of women students increased from a small handful to more than 50 percent of the class, and the number of women faculty grew exponentially.

She became the school’s first woman dean in 1992, serving for eight years. Despite facing severe budget restrictions and the 1996 passage of a California law barring public institutions from recruitment based on affirmative action, Berkeley Law thrived during her tenure with significant expansions to its curriculum, faculty, and clinical program.

Berkeley Law's memorial notice is here.

Miguel Méndez, 1943-2017

I'm saddened to have learned (here, and earlier reported on Above the Law) that Miguel Méndez, Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law Emeritus, passed away last week.  Miguel was an alumnus of the Monterey County Public Defender's Office, California Rural Legal Assistance, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund.  He was a seasoned trial lawyer who joined Stanford's law faculty at a time when few elite law professors had this kind of experience.  He was also Stanford's first Latino faculty member.  Although I never got to have a class with him, he was among the kindest and most generous law teachers I've ever known, patiently answering rudimentary questions about evidence and trial procedure when, as a student, I wandered into his office unnanounced because I'd heard he would be helpful and, years later, offering valuable strategic advice in a challenging civil case when I was struggling with how to approach a difficult witness.

California Rural Legal Assistance, a sizeable legal aid program serving migrant and low-wage workers and families throughout most of California, is a longtime pro bono client of mine in ethics and regulatory matters; Miguel rose to deputy director of the organization, and his kindness and wisdom were legendary there.

He was 74, and will be widely missed.  Requiescat in pace.

--Bernie

Tony Kaye (1962-2017)

I am stunned and saddened to learn via facebook today that Tony Kaye -- a fabulous scholar of the pre-Civil War era -- has passed away.  Tony was working on what surely would have been a fabulously original and important book on Nat Turner.  Back when I was working on that rebellion I found Tony's work on the role of African Americans around Southampton of immense use in building out the context  African American resistance.  His work, such as "Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion," showed there is so much more yet to learn about the context of that episode of violence.  And obviously given how much is left to learn about the Nat Turner rebellion, how much of the rest of the experience of slavery has yet to be uncovered.

Tony provided I think one of the finest set of comments I have ever had on a paper, which was about the new history of the old south -- an essay review I was putting together about a then-new set of books ranging from Annette Gordon Reed's The Hemmings of Monticello to Laura Edwards' The People and Their Peace.  I was, quite frankly, astonished by and in awe of his insight.  He was one thoughtful and precise scholar.  I was surprised to learn that we'd been neighbors for the last year or so; he moved last year from Penn State to the National Humanities Center, as vice president of scholarly programs.  I guess it's testimony to how much I've been distracted by other issues of late, or by how high institutional barriers are, or something, that I didn't know he was here.

Tony's family are in my thoughts.