“‘Al Hill is the legal scholar’s scholar.’” Al Hill died on December 5, 2015 at the age of 98, outlasting most of his contemporaries. Al had taken senior status when I came to Columbia Law School, and I succeeded him in the course on federal courts. The little I saw of Al left […]
In memoriam
Alfred Hill, a great legal scholar and one of Columbia’s treasures for nearly 50 years, died in 2015 at the age of 98. The Columbia Law Review honored him on his retirement from active teaching in 1991, but Al continued to write important work even into the twenty-first century. Having joined the Faculty in 1962, […]
Miriam Cedarbaum had been a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for six years when I joined that court in 1992. I count myself as lucky for so many reasons, but getting to serve alongside and learn from Judge Cedarbaum falls high on that list. Judge Cedarbaum […]
I must confess that I don’t read law reviews. Of course, I read law review articles, in the course of judicial research and keeping in touch with academic literature in areas of my scholarly interest, but like most judges and lawyers, I don’t have time or interest to just pick up the latest issue […]
Professor Murphy taught me first-year torts in the fall of 2007, near the end of his teaching career. I will never forget the first day of class. He limped slowly into the small seminar room in the basement of Warren Hall—probably eighty-five years old at the time—sat down at a table next to the […]
Columbia Law School’s postwar class of 1948, perhaps more than any other, has brought remarkable distinction to both the school and the law. Marvin Frankel, Jack Greenberg, Jack Kernochan, Arthur Murphy, and Jack Weinstein have all both taught here and acted with enormous distinction and success in the outside world of law—a grouping not […]
Students remember Arthur Murphy as a warm, caring teacher with a great sense of humor, a man who helped them learn and grow. Our colleagues admired and respected his scholarship and his commitment to our school. While I shared all of that, to me, most importantly, Arthur was an empathetic friend for more than […]
Lynn Walker Huntley was one of America’s great champions of civil rights. Her accomplishments will continue to make ours a better world for decades—assuredly outliving her short life, which ended on August 30, 2015. Her paper credentials must not be glossed over, even though Lynn was much more than the summation of her curriculum […]
There were no lawyers in my family. We had never sued or been sued. I barely knew any lawyers’ names. I enrolled at Columbia Law School sight unseen. When I entered in 1975, though, the name I heard fast and often was Lynn Walker, Class of 1970. She was the first black woman ever on […]
What a time it must have been to be alive in 1968. The United States was deep in the throes of the Vietnam War, with public support drastically waning after the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre. One of the modern era’s founding fathers, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and […]