The Faculty Lounge

Richard Beeman

I am sorry to learn that the beloved University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Beeman has passed away.  Beeman taught me the "American Revolution" when I was a senior in college and we read, among other works, Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum, which are two outstanding works of intellectual history.  They each opened a world of ideology and history to me, which has continued to guide my thinking and me work.  Beeman was a fabulous teacher -- and he also seemed very young to me at the time, so this is a particularly sobering moment for me.  I last saw him in February 2002 when I was proud to tell him that I was following in Forrest McDonald's footsteps and teaching at the University of Alabama.  To which he responded something along the lines of, I suspect you're also departing from McDonald's footsteps, too!  He was a wonderful teacher and mentor and scholar, too.  His books include The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry (1984), The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (2004), Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009), and Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776 (2013).  Some years ago when I was posted a picture of the Lunenburg County Courthouse, I noted that Beeman's Evolution of the Southern Backcountry was based in Lunenburg County.

Beeman was a great teacher and a hell of a good guy.

Elizabeth Garrett

I am shocked and saddened to hear that Elizabeth Garrett--president of Cornell University and before that a provost at the University of Southern California and law professor at USC and at the University of Chicago--has passed away. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the news.  I recall hearing, I think from the Chronicle, a few weeks back that she was ill, but I had no idea how dire her situation was.  Elizabeth was a beloved figure in the legal academy.  She was educated at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia Law School, then clerked for Judge Mikva on the D.C. Circuit and Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.  She worked on the Iran-US Claims Tribunal at the Hague and then on the Hill for Oklahoma Senator David Boren.  She began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1995 and was an expert in legislation.

Francis X. Beytagh

I am sorry to report that Francis ("Frank") Beytagh, who served as dean at Ohio State from 1985 to 1993, has passed away.  Cribbing from the Ohio State memorial notice:

Francis X. (“Frank”) Beytagh, dean of the College of Law from 1985-1993, died on February 21 at the age of 80. Dean Beytagh was an outstanding leader, a nationally recognized scholar in his field of Constitutional law, and a dedicated teacher, a role he continued at the College until he took emeritus status in 1997. He continued teaching, on an occasional basis, as an emeritus faculty member until 2006. As dean, Beytagh oversaw the development of the College’s program in alternative dispute resolution, its partnership with Oxford University, and a major building expansion.

The memorial notice is here.

Forrest McDonald (1927-2016)

I am sad to learn from the New York Times that Forrest McDonald has passed away in Tuscaloosa.  He was a leading historian of the founding era.  My relationship with McDonald began, as happens so often for me, the old fashioned way -- through his books.  I read We the People when I was in college and was trying to get a handle on quantitative methods in history.  I'd heard that We the People was an important place to start -- and then later in a fabulous course on the American Revolution taught by Richard Beeman I read Novus Ordo Seclorum.  The latter, though it was published 30 years after We the People, was a successor in that it looked at ideology of the founding generation, rather than economic interest.  It really resonated with me -- and all the more so because had just read Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.  

Though the New York Times obituary emphasizes his conservative ideas (both the obit and his wikipedia page conclude with the observation that he was a self-described paleo conservative), for me the significance of his work is not that he was conservative.  It's that he communicated in crisp prose the insights about economics and ideology of the founding generation.  Ideas mattered, he argued, for the framers of the Constitution and he suggested how that was the case. bI take it the pendulum is now swinging back and we're maybe not taking ideas as seriously as we once did. Maybe that will change again soon and we'll be back to focusing on ideas.

One of my great hopes when I moved to the University of Alabama was that I'd have a chance to spend some quality time with McDonald.  I thought it would be a great treat to get his help on my own work on the ideology and economics of pro-slavery thought.  Alas, I did not have the chance to spend much time with him; we served on a dissertation committee together and he was kind enough to ask about my work whenever we crossed paths, thought that wasn't as frequent as I would have liked.

Lee Roy Chapman

I've just received the shocking news that Oklahoma historian Lee Roy Chapman has passed away at age 46.  Lee Roy lived and worked in Tulsa and his writings often concerned difficult issues in the state's history.  I knew him through his important and deep work on Tate Brady, one of Tulsa's founders and -- at least after Lee Roy's work appeared -- a controversial figure.  Lee Roy's article, "The Nightmare of the Dreamland," explored Brady's role in the violence of the 1910s and 1920s Tulsa in which Brady had a hand.

I wrote about Lee Roy's work at the time: 

Tate Brady, as Lee Roy Chapman points out, did a lot of good for Tulsa, but the positives came with lots of negatives. It is the tragedy of this story that building the city of Tulsa involved violence. In Brady’s case, it was violence against workers and African Americans. Therein lies a story we hear much about in American history at this time. ...

The final, haunting end of Brady’s life, after his son’s tragic death, invites questions about how the violence in early Tulsa injured those who were the perpetrators as well as the victims. Though we will never know, perhaps Brady’s suicide was partly a result of his conscience’s turmoil over the violence he had seen and committed.

This Land's Press, which published a lot of Lee Roy's work, has a memorial notice here, appropriately titled, "Lee Roy Chapman is still the King."  And now that we have lost Lee Roy, a bunch of other people need to step up to try to fill the gaping hole left by his absence.  There's a lot of work left to be done.

And there is a gofundme page for contributions to a fund to support his five year old son, Kasper.

Calvin Massey

I'm very sad to report that Calvin Massey, my friend and mentor -- and one of the founding bloggers here -- has passed away.  Calvin was most recently the Daniel Webster professor at the University of New Hampshire.  Before moving back to the east coast, Calvin taught for many years at Hastings Law.  He had a JD from Columbia (where he was managing editor of the Columbia Law Review) and an MBA from Harvard. and he practiced law for many years before starting his teaching career at Hastings.  Calvin was the author of a widely adopted constitutional law casebook and another in property (and a beloved student aid in property -- I know it was beloved because every semester I'd see lots of students carrying it around!) He was a prolific scholar in constitutional law and property.  

I had heard many good things about Calvin as a teacher from a friend who was a Hastings graduate long before I ever met him.  It was in 2000-01, when we visited at BC together that I got to know Calvin well.  He was a great mentor and cheerleader of everyone around him.  And I still use a lot of his phrases in my classes.  Though many years later, as his health challenges mounted I learned that he had serious health issues when we were teaching together, I didn't know it at the time -- he was the perpetual optimist.  I remember fondly the time spent sitting in his office talking about recent scholarship and teaching methods.  (That was early enough in my career that I still spent an enormous amount of time playing with methods and he was kind enough to indulge me in those talks, though looking back on it I'm sure he had better things to do with his time.)  And since that magical year together I saw him only rarely -- a time when he came to give a talk in Tuscaloosa and another time at a conference back in Boston.  I knew when Dan Filler was talking about starting a new blog that we needed Calvin's outstanding (and I'd say unsurpassed) knowledge of constitutional law and his good humor and we were fortunate that he agreed to join the faculty lounge.  I enjoyed phone conversations with him, which grew rarer over the years.  One of the last times we spoke was when he moved to UNH, which brought him a lot of joy I know.  He loved being back on the east coast and at a place on a strong upward trajectory.  And I recall him talking with great pride about his daughter's graduation from Yale and her sailing around the world.  Ellen is the great pride of his life.

Then last spring he let me know that he was having serious health problems and mentioned that he really wished he had more time and energy to spend on the recent Supreme Court term.  We're going to miss him so much, for his outstanding analysis and his good humor.  

Martha and the rest of his family and the UNH community are in our thoughts here.

Thanks to Ann Bartow for sending along this news.

John Henry Merryman (1920-2015)

I have just learned from Sean Patrick Donlan that long-time and beloved Stanford Law professor John Henry Merryman passed away.  He wrote extensively about art law.  I am most familiar work on repatriation of cultural property, most notably the Elgin Marbles.  One of the things that interested me about his argument is that it seems -- am I allowed to say this -- socialist.  He argued that the Elgin Marbles had become the property of the world and that they should remain in England where more people would see them than if they were returned to Greece.  Property rights, it seemed, were to be assigned to the country where the property would be seen by the most people (or do the most good).  That has, of course, a certain appeal; but my thought was that it is somewhat unfair to take away Greece's claim in this one case.  Thinking on Merryman's work this evening makes me hope I have the chance to revisit it someday.

Merryman began his teaching career at Santa Clara in 1948 and moved to Stanford in 1953 and then retired from there in 1986.  

Marc Poirier (1952-2015)

I have just heard the shocking and sad news that Marc Poirier, a pillar of the progressive property community, has passed away.  Marc taught for many years at Seton Hall Law School, where he was a professor of law and the Martha Traylor Research Scholar.  Marc's work, particularly in recent years, was focused on property theory, environmental law, and law and sexuality (his articles on ssrn are here).  And his teaching focused in the same areas.  One of his most popular articles is "The Cultural Property Claim within the Same Sex Marriage Controversy," which won the Dukeminier award in 2008.  A lot of you will enjoy reading "One L in a Different Voice: Becoming a Gay Male Feminist at Harvard Law School."  Marc's personality really comes through here.

Just last fall I had the pleasure of hearing Marc talk about one of his new projects, on memorial sites for the gay rights struggle.  I'm looking forward to the fruits of that project.  Marc was about a lot more than scholarship, but the progressive property community will feel this loss particularly because we've lost Marc's energy, creativity, and enthusiasm.  His students, family, and the Seton Hall community are in my thoughts.

Thanks to Marc Roark for sending along this sad news.

In Memoriam: Christopher Fairman

Christopher Fairman, a professor and associate dean at Ohio State Law passed away yesterday from cardiac arrest.  He was 54.  He joined the OSU faculty in 2000 and worked primarily in the area of Civil Procedure.

In Memoriam: Daniel Meltzer

Harvard Law Professor Daniel Meltzer passed away from cancer this weekend.  He was 63.  Meltzer joined the Harvard faculty in 1982, playing several roles in the faculty and administration,  and also served in the Obama administration.  He had been scheduled to take over from Lance Liebman as the Director of the American Law Institute in 2014, but never was able to fully take on the job due his illness.

William Cohen, RIP

I just learned that William Cohen, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law Emeritus at Stanford Law School, died last month at age 81.  He clerked for Justice Douglas, and taught at Minnesota, UCLA, and then Stanford from 1970-99.  He taught Torts, Constitutional Law, and Federal Courts with an exceptional combination of scholarly depth, practical wisdom and good humor.  Obit here.  

Requiescat in pace, Bill.

Michael O'Brien (1948-2015)

I am deeply saddened and shocked to report that the distinguished intellectual historian Michael O'Brien passed away yesterday.  He was a professor of history at Cambridge University.  He is best known for his two volume work Conjectures of Order, which is about intellectual history in the south from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War.  Michael won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for those two volumes.  His other terrific work includes a biography of South Carolina lawyer Hugh S. Legare, The Idea Of The American South, 1920-41 (1979), and an edited collection All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse In The Old South.  The latter helped to introduce the idea that southerners in the years before Civil War had ideas worthy of study.  With David Moltke-Hansen he co-edited an important volume on Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston.

I have spent many, many hours with Michael's work -- perhaps more hours than those of any other historian -- and am always astonished at how terrific they are.  He read so much that he was able to see connections between writers that the people he's writing about may not have seen themselves.  When I mentioned that to him back in 2010 when I first met him, he smiled and said something along the lines of, "that's the point of intellectual history!"  Among my favorite chapters in Conjectures of Order are the ones on proslavery thought (no surprise) and the use of books -- so often intellectual historians are interested in books I guess because it's how the receive and transmit their ideas.

There are a lot of places where Michael's work influenced me greatly -- especially in appreciating the influence of European ideas on southerners and on the importance of economic and historical thought to them.  And while judges and lawyers (other than in the Legare biography) aren't central to O'Brien's thought, the framework he developed for discussing conservative intellectuals is extremely useful for discussing them.  I have some thoughts on how O'Brien's framework helps us understand what judges were doing in this chapter in Sally Hadden and Patti Minter's Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History.

About this I have to say, he was a damn smart man and a beautiful writer.  He was a phenomenal scholar.  We have lost one of the very best practitioners of the historian's craft -- and one of the best intellectual historians since Perry Miller.  (About the comparison to Miller I have to have something more to say when I'm done with grading.)  

Michael's wide-ranging interests appear in the variety of projects that his students pursued.  Cribbing now from his Cambridge University webpage, here's a description of the his students' projects:

He has supervised research students at universities in the United States and at Cambridge on various aspects of American history since the late eighteenth century: topics have included Southern intellectuals (Richard Weaver, Thomas Cooper, Basil Manly, St George Tucker), the constitutionality of the Second Amendment, Unionism in antebellum South Carolina, Noah Webster and American concepts of language, prisoner-of-war narratives after the Civil War, Southern concepts of honor, German emigré intellectuals, George Santayana, Henry Adams, freedmen's aid societies during Reconstruction, the pragmatism of Clarence Irving Lewis, the epistemology of American science in the late nineteenth century, African-American thought in the 1960s, and (inexplicably) American foreign policy in Nasser's Egypt.

Update: My friend James Fuller has a remembrance of O'Brien at H-Net.  

Cambridge University's memorial notice is here.  Among my favorite lines from it are "He was a man of quiet passions, including golf, jazz and Spurs, but his deepest passion was words. He said little but wrote much, cherishing the craft and artistry of writing."

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History has a memorial notice up here. 

The Guardian's obituary is here.  H/t Doug Thompson.

In Memoriam: Greg Lastowka

I am incredibly sad to report that a wonderful colleague of ours in the Philadelphia area - Professor Gregory Lastowka, of Rutgers-Camden Law - has passed away.  He was 46.  Greg died after a year of battling cancer.  In addition to being a remarkable scholar, Greg was an amazingly kind and gentle man.  He is already missed.

Stanley Kutler (1934-2015)

I am sorry to report that long-time University of Wisconsin history professor Stanley Kutler passed away on April 7.   Kutler is best known for his extensive work on Nixon -- he sued to get access to the Nixon tapes -- (and I blogged about a controversy around his edition of the Nixon tapes back in 2009).  But he is probably best-known among legal historians for a wonderful volume on the Charles River Bridge case,  Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (1971), as well as his first book, Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics (1968) and his 1982 book The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War.  He was also the founding editor of Reviews in American History, which is one of my favorite periodicals.

Dan Ernst has a lovely memorial of Kutler over at legal history blog.

Law Professors Who Have Passed Away Recently

As I've noted over at Leiter, several law professors have passed away in the past few weeks.  They include Robert Pitler (Brooklyn), Dave Frohnmayer (Oregon), Charles Rice (Notre Dame), and William Wilks (South Texas).  

In Memoriam: John Murray

I let this one fall off my radar.  John Murray, a former dean of both Pittsburgh Law and Villanova Law, and President of Duquesne,  passed away February 11.  He was 82.  Murray joined the Duquesne Law faculty in 1959. 

In Memoriam: Monroe Freedman

The noted legal ethicist, Monroe Freedman, passed away on Wednesday.  He was 86.  For the last 42 years, he had been a member of the Hofstra Law faculty and he served as the school's second dean.  Among criminal defense attorneys, he was widely recognized for his support of zealous advocacy of criminal defendants.  

In Memoriam: Harvey Goldschmid

Columbia Law Professor Harvey J. Goldschmid passed away today at 74.  In addition to his long career on the Columbia law faculty, with a focus on corporate law, he served as a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2002-05.  

Coach Smith, R.I.P.

This post may seem strange coming from a life-long Dukie, but I want to note the passing of Dean Smith, the long-time coach of basketball at UNC.

College basketball often seem to reek. One can look at the immense amount of money that is earned, little of which seems to benefit the stars. Corrupting commercial ventures seem to become more important than traditional academic values. What should be a student-centric activity places the financial supporters of the university in the good seats and the students near the rafters or behind the goals.

All of this seemed to be under control when Coach Smith ran the UNC program. His students graduated. He followed the rules and expected all of his staff and players to do likewise. Despite this, (or, I hope, because of it), his teams played the game well. I will not pretend that I was happy when his team beat my Duke team, but I always knew that the contest had been legitimate and that the better team on that day had been victorious.

So, I pause today to remember a great coach, teacher and man. Rest in peace.

Jonathan Ocko (1946-2015)

I am shocked and saddened to hear that my friend Jonathan Ocko passed away suddenly yesterday. Jonathan was a professor of history at North Carolina State University, where he specialized in Chinese legal history. We worked together for many years as co-conveners with Ed Balleisen of Triangle Legal History. His work included Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China and Contract and Property in Modern China. In addition to being a terrific scholar, a terrific reader of papers even those far outside his area of expertise, and a great mentor to everyone around him, Jonathan led the NC State history department for many years. He also taught for many years at Duke law. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Yale. Before moving to NCSU in 1977, Jonathan taught at Clark and Wellesley. Maybe most importantly, he had a great sense of humor. As I learn more about remembrances and memorial services I'll post them.

Update: North Carolina State University has an extended memorial that discusses Jonathan's many accomplishments as a teacher, scholar, and administrator here. And over at Chinese Law Prof blog, Donald Clark has a remembrance of Jonathan.

H/t Ed Balleisen.