Osler's Razor

I am devoting Wednesdays on the blog to profiling some of my classmates at Yale Law. I'm really amazed by what people have done-- each time I research one of them I have discovered a fascinating story.

Like a bunch of the people I have profiled already, Denise Morgan was double Yale-- she graduated from Yale College in 1986 before coming to the law school there.  Her parents were from Montserrat, and she grew up in the Bronx.

After law school she did... pretty much everything. She worked for a big firm. She clerked for a federal judge. She was a beloved law professor at Florida State and at New York Law School. She was an advisor to the nation of Eritrea as they drafted their constitution. She married and had a daughter.

In 1995, she took over a crucial school financing case in New York, representing the state's Black, Puerto Rican, and Hispanic legislative caucus. In 2003, that case resulted in a ruling that the state had shortchanged minority students in New York City schools in financing-- a disparity that advantaged suburban students by about five billion dollars a year. It was a huge victory for what is right.

And then, in April of 2006, she died.  It chokes me up to write that; she did such good in the world in her 41 years.

Lives like hers raise a challenge to the rest of us, who have the good fortune of longer lives, and the moral obligations to our society that come with it.