Osler's Razor

As many of you have deduced through these Wednesday profiles, there were a lot of characters in my class at Yale Law-- the kind of people you would long remember. The biggest character in the school, though, was the Dean, Guido Calabresi.

His spirit--adventurous, optimistic, bold, and a little wacky-- animated the place he led. Everyone knew that he was smarter than us, yet he had an endearing humanity and even humility to him. He had that greatest of all talents among teachers: he could make complex things simpler, without sacrificing the integrity of the subject. 

He came to the United States as a young boy, an immigrant from Italy whose family were anti-fascists at a time of fascism there. His brilliance seems to have been apparent immediately; he graduated from Yale College, studied in England as a Rhodes Scholar, returned to study at Yale Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, and returned to Yale as the youngest full professor-- all this with no gaps or wasted time, boom, boom, boom.

And he didn't slow down once he got back to Yale. He is a co-founder of the Law and Economics movement, which became a distinct influence on my own work (especially in my analysis of drug laws). He taught everyone (even me) torts, and made it seem interesting to nearly all of us. 

He was dean from 1985 to 1994, a period in which Yale gained its position as the top law school in the country. He left when Bill Clinton, a former student, appointed him to the Second Circuit. 

He was disarming to those with pretensions, a wonderful tool in a law school. And he was, yes, a little wacky. I introduced him to my parents when they were visiting and we chanced upon him in the hallway. He punched my dad in the arm, said "that is a tort!" and ran off down the hallway.

"Who was that, again?" my parents asked.

"That," I said happily, "is our Dean."

# posted by Mark Osler @ 12:00 AM