Osler's Razor

When I entered Yale Law School I felt (like most of the other students) like the admission department's mistake.

When I graduated, I felt like I had to, and could, change the world.

The man most responsible for that change was Prof. Dan Freed, who died yesterday in New York. Prof. Freed taught me sentencing, and more importantly, who I wanted to be-- and who I wanted to be was him. He was a wonderful teacher and writer who played a major role in both the development of the federal sentencing guidelines and the later critiques of those same guidelines. His sentencing class often met on Saturdays beginning at 8 am, and I never missed a minute. He arranged for us to work with a group of Alabama judges, and the experience defined my law school experience. Later, it was in part his influence that convince my next major mentor, Judge Jan DuBois, to hire me as a clerk. I owe much of my career to him.

On his tribute page, I wrote the following inadequate comment:

Prof. Freed was the warm, kind, brilliant, engaged teacher who probably never realized the profound effect he had on his students. He engaged us on many levels– challenging our beliefs and ideas at the same time that he challenged us personally and supported us in our endeavors. He is the reason, the primary reason, that I am a law teacher (I wanted to be like him), that I am passionate about sentencing (he was right to care so much), and that I try to be fully human with my students (he was that, as well).

There are bonds of love that tie the world together– romantic love, agape love, love within faith– but the bond between a teacher and student is nothing less than any of those. It is one we carry on forever, that survives even death. If there is immortality on this world, it is that, and there is no one, no one, who has achieved it more stunningly than Daniel Freed. Yes, it is his spirit that carried forward in Blakely, in Booker, in Kimbrough, in Spears, but more importantly in what we all teach, which is a lengthening of his own mind and passion across space and time to our own students, who will go on to accomplish things we cannot imagine.

I, too, am a Freedian forever.

A day or two after the Spears decision came down last year from the U.S. Supreme Court, I received an email that I printed out and folded and kept in my pocket for weeks, rereading it probably a hundred times because it made me feel so good. It was from Dan Freed:

Mark

Fantastic achievement!

You and your students deserve highest praise for the wisdom, persistence and courage with which you pursued this important sentencing issue over many years. Judge DuBois must be proud and all smiles at your victory.

You can also imagine how delighted I am to watch how far you've climbed since those early years when we had the privilege of working together along with those wonderful classmates and our memorable Alabama judges.

Dan Freed was proud of me. That was as good as it gets. And note that he, more than anyone, understood that what happened was not mine, it was also my students' victory because I was a teacher and that collaboration was teaching. Note, too, that he also described his teaching me as the two of us "working together"-- a way of thinking about teaching that I learned from him.

Even now, writing this, the tear in my eye is not just in sadness because he is gone, but in joy because that happened before he was gone. It is perhaps the greatest testament to him as a teacher that I carried his email, folded and weathered, on my hip for all those days.

I will miss him, and so will the world.