Osler's Razor

As law students, we had the sense that the smartest person at Yale Law was the Dean, Guido Calabresi. He taught torts to all of us and was a constant presence in the hallways, so the basis for this was no secret. His intelligence was not conveyed through doctrinal knowledge-- all of our professors were masters of their fields. Rather it was through occasional bits of revealed wisdom that we saw his mind at its best.

Though he was an accomplished scholar at the highest levels, Dean Calabresi was eminently practical. He taught the policy behind torts, but in a way that was clear, sensible, and innately connected to the actual practice of law. This approach is still clear in his 1970 classic, The Cost of Accidents.

Each year, a scholar from another school would come and deliver the Storrs lecture, and the faculty and students would assemble nearly as a whole. One year, the speaker was a Harvard professor who was part of the leading academic trend of that moment, which borrowed heavily from literary theory. He spoke for well over an hour, pacing back and forth. For the life of me, I could not figure out what he was talking about, and neither could the classmates I sat with. His tone and verbiage reflected great intelligence, and we all felt like idiots, I suspect. Well, until the Dean rose to close the occasion.

Dean Calabresi was brief. I can't remember his precise words, but it was something like this: "Thank you so much, professor. I must confess to not knowing what a lot of that meant, which must mean that you are a far wiser man than I am."

The speaker grinned, pleased with the compliment. In the audience, we grinned, too, and even laughed, as we understood the Dean's words in a very different way. Though we may not always succeed, it is safe to say that many of us went out those heavy wooden doors into the New Haven rain determined to be like our Dean, and to create ourselves in a form very different than that taken by our speaker that day.