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Yale Law School annual letter arrives. Life is complete.
By Tom Smith

The annual holiday (it would be wrong to say Christmas) dean's letter has arrived from the Yale Law School. It is always good for a few laughs. For example, on Jan Deutsch's retirement:

"To say that Jan Deutsch approaches constitutional and corporate law from an original point of view is--as all Jan's former students can attest-- a wild understatement . . . Well, you can say that again. An insane point of view would be more accurate . . . of the utterly fresh contribution he has made, during his 38 years on the faculty, to their understanding of these subjects. "Fresh" is good. I would be surprised if Deutsch was aware of any corporate law case after Perlman v. Feldman or indeed that Learned Hand had in fact, died, and therefore was no longer shaping corporate law. But I have an ax to grind. I was actually ejected from Professor Deutsch's class after disagreeing with him about the Holocaust. He said after the US Army took Germany, all the Nazis should have been summarily executed. I said, no, there could be cases of mistaken identity, false denunciations and so forth, so there would have to be some kind of procedure to figure out who the Nazis really were, then they could be executed. Professor Deutsch told me to get a drop slip and he would sign it. He wasn't kidding. He had, as far as I could tell, absolutely no sense of humor. Jan has helped his students see the unexpected in the familiar and the mysterious in the known. Such as how a person with a flagrant mental illness is allowed to continue teaching for 38 years. I like tenure as much as the next guy, but sheesh, give the kids a break. In Jan's discerning eye, a single case becomes the proverbial grain of sand in which the whole universe of law may be glimpsed . . . it's called obsessive-compulsive disorder and it responds well to SSRI's but hey, who's complaining and those who have walked the path of the law with this extraordinary guide can never forget the depths he has shown them. Oh, puhleeeese. More like, left the path of the law and fallen into the depths of a very strange man's extremely personal obsessions. This insanity was enabled by a slavish band of groupies Deutsch managed to surround himself with every year, many of whom were a few fries short of a happy meal themselves.

Abe Goldstein is also retiring. He was a good teacher and a nice man. Unpretentious in a place where that was, let us say, an uncommon virtue. He gave me my only 'low pass' and it was richly deserved. I knew practically nothing about criminal procedure and he crafted a deadly exam about grand jury intricacies, I remember. He probably was just too nice to fail me. I'm a corporate law person. All I know about criminals is I don't like 'em.

There is now a David Boies Professorship at Yale. Well, OK. I'd rather have that than Al Gore as President. Could we have a Sidney Blumenthal professorship maybe? A William Jefferson Clinton Internship?

Burke Marshall died, we are reminded. He was a brave man, and what really took courage was walking into his office if you were a member of the Federalist Society.

Yochai Benkler has joined the faculty at Yale, an event, I judge from the letter, roughly equivalent to the Second Coming. The importance of his scholarship, apparently, "cannot be overestimated." I'm sure it's swell scholarship, it's not my area and I've never heard of him, but is it really impossible to overestimate its importance? Haven't you just done so? Is he as great a legal mind as, say, Sandra Day O'Connor? Jan Deutsch?

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I went to Yale. I would have been lost in the crowd at Harvard, eaten alive at Chicago, and spent all my time skiing and playing outdoors had I gone to Stanford. It was nice to be able to get Honors without going to class, which was a relief, since sometime in my first year my butt-kissing gene just poof! turned off, just like that. In many places, like graduate school, that would have been the end. Fortunately, at Yale, as long as you did not attempt to talk to the professors, with some exceptions, they would not hold this against you. I liked a few of my professors, but I'll only mention Bob Bork, a brilliant and extremely kind man who was abused by his colleagues at Yale. It was a great irony that this former Marine who wouldn't hurt a fly was savaged by these people who never run out of nice things to say when they're talking about themselves. The we're-so-wonderful-we-can-barely-stand-it tone of these letters, going back over more than a decade, is always a bit hard to take.
posted by thomas at 12/16/2003 04:33:00 PM