CLASS NOTES*
Riper/More Mature/Earlier
Winter 2022-2023
Inspired by Richard Epstein's account, in the last Yale Law Report, of his interview with Jack Tate, Chuck
Stark thought “I'd chime in with my own.”
Here is Chuck’s remembrance: "In my senior year as a philosophy major at Princeton, I had no idea what I was going to, or wanted to, do next. With the draft looming, though, I thought I
ought to apply to something and decided to take the LSATs. Happily, my LSAT results far outshined my so-so college grades. I decided, without much optimism, to sign up when Jack
Tate came to the campus to interview for YLS.
"We had a good conversation, and he asked me what law schools I was applying to and what my LSAT scores had been. I hadn't submitted any applications yet and rattled off the half
dozen or so top law schools. I told him my LSAT scores, which were all well into the 99th percentile - including a perfect score on the general knowledge section. (The latter was less a
tribute to being well-read, which I wasn't, and probably more a result of my longstanding addiction to the New York Times crossword.) Embarrassed that my list of law schools was on
the presumptuous side, given my mediocre grades, I asked whether he thought I'd get into any of them. He said yes, all of them. That took me aback, and I asked, incredulously,
whether he meant Yale, too. He said yes.
"Armed with that boost, I only applied to Yale and Harvard. The choice, if I really ended up with the choice, seemed to me an easy one. Harvard was said to be an intensely competitive
and not especially congenial environment. Yale, by contrast, was said to take the pipe and slippers approach to the law. When I got my Yale acceptance before hearing from
Harvard, I withdrew the Harvard application. I've been grateful for that choice, and that opportunity, from the day I walked in the door to this moment."
Chuck adds, “Terry and I are planning a ten-week driving trip around Europe this fall. We did a similar trip in the US a year before Covid which we enjoyed enormously, so thought
we'd do something similar in Europe before our kids confiscate our driver's licenses. We're looking forward to visiting friends and places we haven't seen for a while, and some places
we've never had the chance to visit.”
Put Brown adds another great personal experience with the admission dean who opened the Yale Law door to many of us “I love reading the stories about
Jack Tate.” Put writes: “The common theme is how wonderful, and often inexplicable, it is that the people who tell their stories were admitted at all. So many of us have wondered that. In
my case, I think I know. I had assumed for a long time that I’d go to graduate school, get a Ph.D. in American History and become a teacher. Yale had the country’s most distinguished
program, so I hoped to go there. After procrastinating for too long, I made an appointment to meet with the appropriate Dean of Admissions on February 2. His first question was, ‘Now,
Mr. Brown, if you are admitted, when do you hope to come?’ ‘This September, sir,’ I replied. He thought about that for a few seconds and replied, ‘Well, Mr. Brown, we closed our
applications on January 31. Don’t you think it would be a disservice to those who cared enough about our program to learn of our deadlines if we continue with this conversation any
further,’ or something to that effect. ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, as he got up to show me the door. Not even five minutes had elapsed; my bus back to college left late in the afternoon; and the
Viet Nam war raged. What was I going to do both until my bus left and long-term after that? Dazed, I wandered through the campus and, just as a bell rang, went into a building I knew
nothing about. I followed a group of students into a large classroom and sat down in the back row, I hoped inconspicuously. It turned out to be Joe Goldstein’s criminal law class at the
law school. They were talking about recidivism and the purpose of criminal law. It was a fascinating give-and-take; I’ll apply here, I thought. When I got back to Williams, I learned that
the timing would be just right. I had a few days to sign up for the LSAT and representatives from the law school would be visiting campus in about two weeks. Finally, a month or six
weeks later, I went to New Haven for the mandatory personal interview with Jack Tate. At some point during our conversation, I mentioned that I had learned a bit about the history of the
law school at the college session. ‘Oh, that's good. Who did you talk to?’ Embarrassed, I admitted that I couldn’t remember his name. He then told me about two of the interviewers, but
neither sounded right. ‘Well, let’s see,’ he said as he pulled out a file and flipped through a few pages. ‘You spoke with me.’ Maybe that’s why he admitted me: he was so complimented
by my not noticing his strikingly bald head and one arm that he gave me the nod. [More Tate].
In response to my request for memories of law school days, Joan Andersson wrote, “Well here’s one little nugget. In our first few days or weeks at the law school
Mathea and I met. She approached me in the main hall and asked if I knew where the ladies room was. From that incident grew a friendship that remains very
close today. Now that I have moved to Berkeley and she lives in San Francisco we have grown even closer. You just never know how a friendship of more than 50 years can start!!”
Jack Carley reports, “My news is about Ian trashing the barrier island of Gasparilla and the community of Boca Grande, 1700 residents, where I live during the
winter months. Luckily, we were still in New York City. My home faces the Port Charlotte Bay and suffered minimal damage, some water through windows that not covered by metal
shutters. We had to remove all furnishings to storage in case of mold. Remediation is ongoing with moisture readings etc. Power and water are being restored. Mail is being delivered.
Restaurants, all three, are struggling back to life. The magnificent Gasparilla Inn Beach Club facing the Gulf of Mexico was destroyed. The bakery was crushed when the cell phone
tower fell on it, but the sole family-owned local grocery store was undamaged.
“The eye of the storm landed just south of the island with winds clocked at 200 miles per hour. But because the island was so close to the eye, there was no storm surge which would
have been catastrophic. Damage was random from one house to another but nothing like what we have seen in Fort Myers. The cleanup is going to take many months. We don’t know
when we can go to our home. But we do know we are among the lucky ones with another home to go to and the resources to rebuild. Not so for many others in Florida who lost
everything.”
Richard Ober writes “Carol and I spent a great week in November 2021 in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada watching 45+ polar bears. As part of the Princeton
Gerrymandering Project, I helped staff the New Jersey Legislative Apportionment Commission, which adopted the first BIPARTISAN legislative map in its history. Also, I just finished five
days of downhill skiing at Mt. Bachelor, Oregon, and had dinner with Steve Gabbe Princeton '65 and his wife in Bend, then on to Park City and Deer Valley, Utah.
At last, Peter d’Errico ’s book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, is in the bookstores. His publisher, Praeger, explains
the importance of Peter’s new book: “In this wide-ranging historical study of federal Indian law—the field of U.S. law related to Native peoples—attorney and educator Peter P. d’Errico
argues that the U.S. government’s assertion of absolute prerogative and unlimited authority over Native peoples and their lands is actually a suspension of law.
”Telling the crucial and under-studied story of the U.S. legal doctrines that underpin the dispossession and domination of Indigenous peoples, this book intends to enhance global
Indigenous movements for self-determination.
”Combining a deep theoretical analysis of the law with a historical examination of its roots in Christian civilization, d’Errico presents a close reading of foundational legal cases and
raises the possibility of revoking the doctrine of domination. The book’s larger context is the increasing frequency of Indigenous conflicts with nation-states around the world as
ecological crises caused by industrial extraction impinge drastically on Indigenous peoples’ existences. D’Errico’s goal is to rethink the role of law in the global order—to imagine an
Indigenous nomos of the earth, an order arising from peoples and places rather than the existing hegemony of states
Norm Leventhal is also the author of an important new book, Rene, el Tigre, & Me: Up Close & Personal - Spanish Television in America.
The publisher writes, “After 50 years of private practice in the field of communications law, Norm Leventhal has decided to write the story of how he was fortunate enough to meet
the two principal forces in the birth, growth, and maturity of Spanish language television in America and how his law career became thoroughly intertwined with these two giants of
Spanish media for more than four decades.
“It is a story of the development of Spanish language television in the United States - its modest beginnings, the sacrifices made by its pioneers, its growth over the last few
decades, and what it took - in financial, business, artistic, and legal talent to achieve this newfound success. It is also, more importantly, a story of the lessons that the author learned,
or should have learned, in his role as counsel to the major players in this achievement. It recounts the highpoints of that effort, as well as the failure in temperament and character that
played a part in the mistakes and missteps in judgment that were made in the course of those labors.
“Norm is seventy-plus years old and lives in Potomac, Maryland, with his wife, Ilene. He is also an accomplished amateur photographer whose works have been on public display
several times over the years (go to www.normlvisions.com to see some of his best)”
For Norm’s classmates, his accounts of his early law practice will bring back memories. For instance, his account seeking his first summer clerk’s job: “At Yale Law School I was a great success at mediocrity. I got my share of Bs and Cs, an occasional A and one D (from none other than Robert Bork, my antitrust professor). Anyway, long story short, I completed my three years just above the middle of the class; not bad for a dedicated underachiever. Then, of course, I found out why this was a mistake when I started interviewing for summer associate positions in the fall of 1966. The list included Covington & Burling (Jonathan Blake), Hogan & Hartson (Paul Connolly), Morgan Lewis & Bockius (I can’t recall who) and Arent, Fox (Harry Plotkin). Let me start with the last first.
“I entered the interview room at the law school where Harry Plotkin—a founder and senior partner at Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn, a preeminent D.C. law firm at the time—was seated at the end of the table. We exchanged pleasantries, I sat down and, before I could adjust my jacket, he said: ‘Well, Mr. Leventhal, I see you are not on law review and your grades are only average, but we’ll talk to you anyway since you are here.’ I was astounded by his arrogance. I was not top of my class for sure, but I wasn’t a dunce either. My response: ‘Mr. Plotkin, sir, thank you but I am no longer interested in your firm.’ I left the room.
“The second interview went better.”
Mike Parish shares the following:
“My son Billy’s non-publicly-traded solar finance company MATRIX just served its one millionth customer, has raised 9 billion (with a B) dollars in the capital markets during its 12 year existence, and is now the largest solar finance company in the USA.”
Summer 2022
Junius Williams is writing a piece about his return 57 years later to Selma, Alabama. I have seen an early draft, and it is a
poignant reminder of what African Americans faced in my home region in those days.
It begins with Junius in Alabama.
He writes, “On my way out of Selma, Alabama after the 57th Anniversary 'Bridge Crossing Jubilee,' I stopped at a local restaurant for a breakfast of grits and eggs.
But when I came through the door, the first group I saw was about 10 good ole boys seated at two adjoining tables, having a meeting, very comfortable with each other. I didn’t know whether I should reconsider my need for breakfast and ease on down the road until I saw three black city workers at a table next to them, unconcerned, and enjoying the same breakfast I wanted to have. The Alabama I remembered during the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 was very different. As a SNCC volunteer in Montgomery, I survived white men on horseback chasing me with long sticks, and ultimately jail and Kilby State Prison, all because I wanted the right to vote for black people. Some of those guys might have been the ones after me.
Yes, segregation was long gone, but to actually see members of the two races sitting side by side in an Alabama restaurant was an eyeopener for me.”
**
There will be much more in this piece as Junius continues to help us see the way.
Two items from the Class of 1966 jumped out at me.
In that class’s notes in the last edition there was a report about a scholarship in honor of Ken Kelly, 1966, who was killed in Vietnam. Ken was a fellow Davidson grad. He was working in
the admissions office when I was applying.
I am sure that he persuaded Admissions Dean Tate that the law school needed another Southerner and another Davidson grad. I was admitted, notwithstanding my meager
qualifications. I will be grateful to them both forever.
I share another loss with the class of 1966,
Walter Dellinger. He was a great friend to many and a regular at Sutton's Drug Store in Chapel Hill, where he continued to teach me constitutional law and American politics.
I will miss him and the connection to Yale Law School, something we proudly shared.
Richard A. Epstein wrote, “Your mention of Jack Tate in your last email brings back this memory of that kind and wonderful man.
“My first interaction with Tate took place in early December 1965 when I came back home from Oxford where I was doing my English degree. I took a trip to New Haven for an
admissions interview. “There were no grades available from Oxford that only does an all or nothing examination set at the end of the last year-eight examinations in five
days—Thursday through Monday, with Sunday off. He did, however, have my letters of recommendation including one for Oxford, part of which he read aloud to me. Then he put his
pad under his bad arm and told me to be quiet for a moment. Then he asked whether or not I was curious as to what he had written. So when I said yes, he read it aloud. It went
something like, ‘Richard Epstein is admitted as a second-year transfer student if he gets either a first or second class honors degree at Oxford.’ He then added, ‘I think that you can do
that. And so I was in.’
“Naturally when I did graduate, I forgot to send in my acceptance form over the summer while traveling in Europe, so Jack came to the rescue again. He called my father and
asked, ‘Where’s Richard, and where’s his deposit.’ The deposit came, and the student came shortly later.
“I think that everyone who knew Jack Tate at Yale has a similar story to tell. In his quiet way he was the soul of the Yale Law School.”
Bill Slattery wrote, “D.G., I had the great pleasure of getting to know Ken Kelley a bit, even though he was two years ahead. I thought he was extraordinary. When I learned, long after the fact, that he had been killed, I think in Tet 68, I was deeply saddened. He seemed to me to be very special.”
Peter d'Errico, reacting to the free speech concerns at the law school, gives an example of how “liberals have slipped down that proverbial slippery slope into the illiberal (if not fascist) ‘woke’ abyss.’”
“Woke protestors attacked me 2 years ago in my role as chief elected officer of a small Massachusetts town when I refused their demands that a local resident be charged with a ‘hate crime’ for saying ‘All Lives Matter.’ They literally shouted me down when I explained you can’t have a hate crime without a crime and that saying ‘all lives matter’ (or, for that matter, saying pretty much anything you want) is not a crime, no matter that it may be motivated by hate. Their screaming continued for three consecutive meetings over two months. It was fanned through what I call ‘asocial media,’ including a post referring to the local resident as ‘a toxic person who should be removed from the community.’ In my next meeting, I pointed out the similarity of that post to Nazi vilification of Jews, Gypsies, Gays and other ‘undesirables,’ only to realize they had no sense of that history, despite the fact most of them had degrees of various sorts.
“In the end, I came to the conclusion it was time to parole myself after 13½ years of service, a full year before my term was up. My resignation statement to Town Meeting stunned many residents who had been bystanders into an awareness that the town was no longer the convivial and tolerant place it had been only so recently.”
Great to hear from Peter de Svastich who says he is reserving his diatribes about our law school, “for my frequent conversations with George Bunn, who Peter says, “has become MR WOKE.”
Mel Masuda’s recent book, “The Lucky 7 Lessons They Don't Teach You At Princeton, Yale, and Harvard" is still selling. An Amazon’s promotion says, “In earning
degrees from three prestigious Ivy League universities, Mel Masuda learned valuable lessons that went far beyond the curriculum-from ethics to dealing with intolerance to the value of his
working-class roots. Now, in this concise, candid primer, Masuda reveals the "Lucky 7 Lessons" they don't teach in the classrooms of Princeton, Yale, and Harvard.”
Mel notes that in his excitement about his book and some of his other children he neglected his daughter Kaiewa, a Class of 2001 graduate of Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu
(established in 1887 by Hawaiian princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop for the education of the children of Hawaii with part-or-full-"aboriginal" ancestry), has arrived full-circle. Kaiewa
pronounced "Kai--ev--ah," meaning "taking life as it comes, philosophically") attended Kamehameha Schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. Now, equipped with her master's
degree in counseling psychology (MSCP), she is back at her alma mater as a high school counselor. Kaiewa is also working on her Ph.D. on-line. She is married to Matthew Muranaka,
who has a master's degree in speech therapy and works for the Hawaii Department of Education. Kaiewa and Matt live in Mililani in Central Oahu with their two sons, Kahiau (age 7 as of
April 16) and Keolaloa (age five as of June 26). Kahiau is literally following in his mother's footsteps. He finished kindergarten last year and is now in the first grade at Kamehameha
Schools -- Class of 2033.
Hamilton Osborne‘s daughter Sara, who lives in Bronxville, NY, gave birth to her second daughter and Ham’s second grandchild in early 2022. Both mother and child are healthy and thriving.
Mike Parish was happy to help Bill Horwich celebrate his 80th birthday “out here in Left Coast Commie land. Bill organized a book club here which has been a salvation to a newcomer. They meet every month.
Max Gitter also chimed in with his happy birthday message as well. They were roommates their first year.
Hardy Wieting keeps Mike entertained with his forwards of poetry articles and materials and his regular printouts about covid cases and deaths in the LA region. Mike sends Hardy bird and granddaughter pix and my hopefully somewhat original work.
Robert Sable writes, “I continue to volunteer at my old legal services program, Greater Boston Legal Services, taking individual bankruptcy. cases. It is a constant reminder of how hard it is to be poor in this country. I think it was at our 25th reunion, Lenny Becker reminded us that we all thought when we graduated that in 25 years we would have abolished poverty in this country. How profoundly we failed.
Eric Schnapper writes, “I have a new grandson, Alexander, born on his mother’s birthday, Bastille Day.”
Patricia Skigen writes, “One of the things I loved about YLS was the willingness to hear differing opinions and then, to laugh at each other’s differences and reach beyond them. Colleagues were colleagues, no matter what their political views.”
She sends the following personal update:
“Our activities have returned to a more normal routine, with frequent outings to the Lyric Opera, the symphony, Chicago’s theaters and near weekly visits with two of our sons and their families. We haven’t ventured out to the museums yet--standing on my feet for extended periods of time has been difficult since the knee replacement surgery. Physical therapy and Pilates help but the recovery has been slower than anticipated. I may be experiencing the onslaught of age, but whatever the cause, it’s been a strange (and sad) experience to be with our two youngest grandchildren without playing touch football, hockey or soccer with them. Hopefully, this will change in the coming months. Warmer weather helps everything!
“We are planning on going to Washington D.C. for the mid-April opening of the Preston Singletary glass and the Hung Liu painting exhibits, and unless recent events cause Viking to cancel our scheduled trip to Eastern Europe, to Hungary, Slovenia and Romania in May. We were fortunate to have visited the Crimea when we did; I fear the Crimea and the Western part of the Ukraine will never be the same during our lifetime.
“In an effort to simplify our lives and our estate planning, we finally bit the bullet and sold our NYC condo. After almost three years in Chicago, I still miss the Big Apple, but our visits (and the friends) there have become fewer and fewer, thanks to Covid and to several southward migrations.”
I rarely hear from Michael Smith but when he wrote the following about my undergraduate college, I knew I had to share it with my Yale classmates. “Delighted to learn of your Davidson heritage (my daughter's alma mater). A truly great school--both academically and culturally. You must have been there in Lefty Driesell's years, but just before he broke the race barrier by recruiting Mike Malloy from Brooklyn, thus driving Dean Smith to do the same by chasing down Charlie Scott. My daughter Ashley graduated just before Steph Curry got there, giving me all the more reasons to root for Davidson (and brilliant coach McKillop) ever since.”
Next time I will get Mike to write about his alma mater, Princeton, a great school we recognize as the “Davidson of the North.”
NOTE: My interview with Frank Bruni about new book, "The Beauty of Dusk," is available for listening at:
Dusk [May 7]
Winter 2021-2022
Roger Anderson, writing to Mike Parish, says, "Greetings from Denmark where I am living and Zoom working. Developing a global business based on two unique technologies, both will support a cleaner future. One will generate hydrogen and needs no electricity. H2 is one of the most abundant elements, not only in water but elsewhere. Europe is pushing it as the fuel that will assist in meeting the goals set for 2024. The other will be a factor in augmenting lack of drinkable water and provide the tools necessary for cleaner mining As to children my oldest has been nominated for an Emmy in lighting, and my youngest is with the State Dept. currently serving in Georgia following a double posting in Ukraine, which earned him a subpoena to testify in Congress."
Jack Carley celebrated his 80th birthday this past July with family on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island. He is glad to have made it and in qood health, as far as I know." Jack worries that the cancel culture has arrived at the Law School. He has specifics that he will be glad to share. He worries, “It seems they think only one way of thinking is permissible at Yale Law School these days. The notion of having a clash of conflicting ideas we knew as students is officially dead.”
Peter d'Errico writes, "Last year tutored my 14-year-old granddaughter Lucia, who is being homeschooled, in reading Dickens's Bleak House. It's an excellent introduction to law and legal process. She wrote a series of essays concluding with a study of metaphor in Dickens and law. This year starting today, I'm tutoring my 11-year-old grandson Saffin also homeschooled in reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. He's taking notes but not yet writing."
Jim Goetz writes "Carl Helmstetter and his friend Mary Cornelius, spent a lovely three days in Big Sky country with me and Jill Davenport at their summer place on Flathead Lake.” Carl and Jim, good buddies in law school, had not seen each other in more than 50 years except for one brief business visit in Kansas City. Here is an update about Carl from his firm's website:
“Carl Helmstetter, a partner with Spencer Fane, practices with the environmental group and the litigation and dispute resolution group. He concentrates in the areas of CERCLA litigation, allocation, landfill siting and permitting and alternative dispute resolution Every year for 6 plus years he has been chosen as one of The Best Lawyers in America Environmental Law section. He is a member of the American Bar Association Sections of Dispute Resolution, Natural Resources, Energy and Environmental Law and Litigation. He is a past Chairman of the Mediation Committee of the ADA Section of Dispute Resolution. He is a frequent lecturer on environmental issues for various bar associations and conferences.”
Eric Schnapper celebrated the birth of his second grandson, Alexander. He is still teaching and litigating and now serves on the state advisory committee to the US. Commission on Civil Rights.
Mel Masuda has published a beautiful and provocative little book, The Lucky 7 Lessons They Don't teach you at Princeton Yale, and Harvard. Mel tells the fascinating story of his family's background as very poor Japanese immigrants making their way in Hawaii and of Mel's own struggles as a minority. I learned so many things that Mel confronted at Yale that I didn't know about.
In earning degrees from three prestigious Ivy League universities, Mel learned valuable lessons that went far beyond the curriculum- from ethics to dealing with intolerance to the value of his working class roots.
Mel recently wrote to Eric Schnapper after seeing a new photo of Eric's grandson: “Your grandson in the photo has the stern visage --already-- of a serious-looking US. Supreme Court Justice (by then there will be an 18-year term limit, as suggested by the report of the Biden Constitutional Law Scholars Group the other day) peering down from the bench in the granite temple that is the Court Building on Capitol Hill.”
Mel continues "My son Maka, with his master's degree in business analytics is with Amazon, Government Payments Division in Seattle, and his wife Allison née Ayers, originally from Anaheim CA, is with Google, XBox Marketing Division. Maka and Alison live in Sammamish, WA, and have two fraternal twin sons Ikaika (meaning 'Strong' in Native Hawaiian) and Kapono ('the good'). They turned 9 years old on Dec. 14, 2021."
Mel writes to everyone. “It's tres interessant to me, who was born a second-generation individual of the worldwide Japan Diaspora. I'm in good company with 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature awardee Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, a British author of Japanese origin, who wrote The Remains of the Day, The US, Census Bureau released the statistics on how our 300 million plus populace answered the ancestry question on the 2020 U.S. Census. The fourth largest ethnic group in the USA is now, as of the 2020 Census, people like my grandkids Ikaka and Kapono, namely those individuals of mixed' ancestry (after whites, Latinx, Black). AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islanders) comprise less than 10 percent -- namely 6 percent.
Bob McManus reminded me that I had asked my classmates for memories of our days in law School. He says, "While I have many, I didn't think any was of general interest. But your renewed request triggered something of possible interest, to wit: 'The Meanest Thing I Ever Did at Law School'.
Here is this story: “In the fall of 1965, I believe we were all anxiously looking about us, gauging our mental acuity as compared to the other 160 or so putative wunderkinder in our class. I know I was. There came a time that fall when all of us were researching our first memo of law for our seminars. Most of these including mine in Con Law with Prof Fritz Scharpf '61 LLM, involved the criminal due process binge of the Warren Court. Working late in the library one night I discovered I really really needed to read a very recent Supreme Court case involving retroactivity, United States ex rel. Linkletter v. Walker. For several hours, I periodically scanned the shelves armed with a scrap of paper on which I had jotted down all three parallel citations to this case, but all three of the volumes were constantly in use by others. Finally, finally, one version was returned to its place, and I was able to grab it and read the case. Minutes later, I was approached by a classmate who sat next to me in Ralph Winter's ‘60 Torts class. I won't name him. ‘Hey McManus’, asked this unsuspecting lad, ‘Do you happen to know of any Supreme Court case on retroactivity?’ I replied in a robotic monotone, giving the full case name followed by all three parallel citations, both volume and page in the US reports, Supreme Court Reporter, and Lawyers Edition, 2d edition.
If that is the meant thing Bob ever did, we need to get him a special award.
In response to a video of my son Grier, born in 1968, that I sent to classmates, Ham Osborne wrote, "My son Hamilton III, was born in 1988 and is thus about 20 years younger than Grier. Hamilton has been married for two years and recently completed a four-year enlistment in the Navy. He enlisted as a SEAL candidate, but a medical issue prevented him from completing his SEAL training. He hopes to enlist in the North Carolina National Guard within the next few weeks. He chose the North Carolina Guard over the South Carolina Guard because the North Carolina Guard has a special forces component, with an office in Charlotte, in which he wants to participate.
"Sharon and I have remained healthy throughout the pandemic, and I remain physically active after five years of retirement. I plan to drive to Asheville on Saturday and then to travel the Blue Ridge Parkway down to its southern terminus at Cherokee. The foliage should be very pretty, and I want to see it.
Mike Parish, who is a great help tracking down news of our classmates has some very interesting news to share.
“My daughter-in-law Wahleah Johns, a full-blooded Navajo, was appointed to the US Dept. of Energy to be in charge of development of energy projects on the almost 600 tribal reservations within the US. She has long opposed coal mining on the reservation, resulting in the closing of the Yuma, A2,coalfired power plant on the US/Mexican border, and was involved in the project to bring solar energy there where, as with most Native American reservations fewer than one third of the residents have electricity or running water. When she was there during the early stages of the pandemic to help, she attended 23 funerals in the three weeks she was there all people she knew or was related to.”
Mike also shared a great memory from law school days. "I took Corporate Tax from Marv Chirelstein in the small room across from the Registrar's Office. He stood through the whole class shaking the change in his pockets, firing out questions and talking machine-gun speed, and i was never so frightened in my life. I skipped about three weeks because I was afraid I’d be called on, especially after the first question he asked was answered by Ed Rogers with a fulsome discussion of the use of preferred stock. I didn't realize Ed's dad was GC of Morgan which would have helped. Eventually I went back to class and managed to answer a question and calmed down. My point in the story is that he gave us a three-question exam, and the second question was particularly good since it had no corporate tax issues in it, although there were a number of issues you needed to ID and say, ‘No, that's not a problem.’ I thought that, in a nutshell, showed what was great about our school that you had people who had the brains and balls to give exams where the answer was ‘none.’ When you think about it, that's much deeper than it looks, and I found frequently in law firm practice that I had partners who would find a problem frequently where there was none so that they could claim some billable hours and a larger share of the purse. Live and learn hopefully.”
Clifford Pearlman is, as, always proud of his very wonderful wife. "My wife Lynn Marks (Penn Law ‘79) received the Philadelphia Bar Association's Sandra Day O’Connor Award in 2007. I will spare you the details lest it sound like excessive pride. For excessive pride, I will refer to the last International Dragon Boat Club World Championships in 2016, in which the boat she stroked picked up one of only two gold medals won by a US boat over five days of competition. She was looking forward to 2020, but the Regatta was canceled "
Pat Skigen writes about her plan for full knee replacement surgery: "We timed my knee replacement to leave sufficient time for me to complete the post-op physical therapy and to be walking well by February, when we are scheduled to travel to Chile, Argentina and Easter Island. This will be our first long trip since moving to Chicago. The three trips we had planned for last year were canceled because of COVID-19. Fortunately, Argentina and Chile recently reopened their borders to vaccinated Americans. Following that, we'll be celebrating my husband Gary's 80th birthday with our extended family -- his two sons and their significant others, my son and his wife, the six grandchildren, and Gary's brother and sister-in-law-at an Arizona ranch resort."
Hardy Wieting decided to keep a weekly table he calls "Sunday night” for COVID-19 cases and deaths in Orange county, CA where
he lives. His first entry was one case. The table did not really get going until the end of March, however, when the total for cases was 321 and there had been three deaths. Each Sunday
night for more than 20 months now the table shows the current numbers, calculates the weekly increase and displays all previous weeks. In April 2020, he expanded the table to include
Los Angeles county (Orange county has 3.2 million people, L.A. county 10 million). His first entry for L.A. county was 12,341 cases and 600 deaths. Eventually he added the state of Arizona
(population more than 7 million), where he travels regularly to see friends.
At the end of May 2020, Orange county had 6,621 cases and 147 deaths. The increase in deaths for the last week of the month was 16. By year's end, the totals were 147,463 and 1,846.
As in the rest of the country, there was a fairly steady decline in weekly rates until the middle of July 2021, when total cases amounted to 256,776 and deaths 5,124, including just one death
for the week ending July 11. Thereafter the decline reversed, and both cases and deaths rose steadily, though by mid-October there was again a decrease, at least in Orange county. The
increase in cases for the week ending Oct. 10 was 1,689, the lowest since July 18. (As of Oct.10, the figures for cases and deaths in L.A. county stood at 1,469,790 and 26,308, and the
figures for Arizona were 1,118,601 and 20,382).
Hardy's principal reason for creating the table was to compare what was happening where he lives with what was happening in Yunnan province, where his conservation work is centered. China, after all, was where it all began, so he thought the comparison might be interesting. What started as curiosity soon turned into an absolutely stunning contrast! Yunnan has 46 million inhabitants (California has 39.5 million). As his table shows, as of Oct. 10, 2021, Yunnan has had a total of 1,502 cases and just two deaths. Good for Yunnan and China, but it makes it impossible for Hardy to travel there.
* a) Class Notes in YLR inserts email address after each person named. For easier reading we've removed these and collected
them all here. Send any update to your email address to our class gmail address, and we will eventually update this
master list.
* b) Death notices removed and placed on our Alas page.
CLASS NOTES*
Riper/More Mature/Earlier
Summer 2021
DG must be doing something right. We have longest entry -- by far -- in Class Notes for Summer 2021 issue:
21 full columns, with but one picture (by Norm); in fact YLR trimmed some of our text (no trimming here!). Nearest competitor is '65,
with 19.75, puffed up by 5 big pictures. Next highest is '75 -- a mere 14 columns, 0 pictures.
One other encouraging fact gained from posting the new notes. The entry for '53, we happened to notice,
begins "With almost 100 surviving members of the class . . ." The entry goes on to complain that no one is sending in news -- but let's emphasize:
"almost 100 surviving members of the class" of '53 !!
First, here are a few reports on how we dealt with COVID and the vaccines.
Robert Baker reports: We have had our second shots (Pfizer) and now have broken containment by having dinner with my wife's sister and her husband. Many Zoom meetings and adult classes. We miss seeing our daughters and grandchildren, but they are locked down in the UK and Norway. Our best hope is to see them for the December holidays.
At my request, Norm Leventhal has shared one of his amazing photos as part of this report.
He also relates his Covid experience and important news about his new book and some ambitious travel plans:
"It seems forever since any degree of normalcy existed in our lives. However, this coming week both my wife, Ilene, and I are scheduled to get our 2nd dose of the Moderna vaccine. It
feels like a 21st birthday, bar mitzvah and wedding — all rolled into one event. What a relief! My children (3) and grandchildren (5) are all healthy and prospering (more or less).
"As a result of our newly achieved status as “fully vaccinated” adults, we are planning on reinstating our long-delayed travel plans:
1. Most immediately, a trip next month (April) to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to visit the children of our very good friends; they are fondly referred to as “The Lawrences of Arabia."
2. In December, 2021 a delayed trip to Antarctica, with a visit to Chile and the Atacama desert first.
3. Next February, 2022, 10 days in St. Kitts with a 4 day stopover in Florida to visit relatives.
4. September 2022, a 14-day cruise around Japan with a stop in Pusan, South Korea.
5. March 2023, a month-long trip (rescheduled for the 4th time) including a cruise from Singapore to Sri Lanka, a flight to Delhi and side-trip to Agra (to see the Taj Mahal).
At that point, I will be almost 80 but, hopefully, will be able to schedule additional trips such as a cruise through the Arctic Ocean, taking the Siberian Express through Russia to the Far
East, and maybe even Cuba (once common sense prevails).
"During these next two years, I will be working on my second photography book to include all of the images from our many trips during the last decade 2013-2023; so look for it in the
Fall of 2023: Our World…As I See It, Vol. II. Many of the images can be seen now on my website: Visions.
In addition, I just released for wide distribution a book I wrote on my role (as a lawyer and business advisor) in the growth and development of Spanish language television in the U.S.;
it is entitled Rene, El Tigre & Me and is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble websites as well as direct order from the publisher Rosedog Books (1-800-788-7654;
www.rosedogbookstore.com). An order form is attached. Copies are already ensconced in the Yale Law School Library and the Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue in
Washington DC (hopefully, soon to be known as 'Washington, Douglass Commonwealth').
"I am anxiously awaiting movie deals from Paramount, Warner Bros. and Disney; and although casting is still up in the air, I am thinking Brad Pitt would play me with Catherine Zeta Jones
as my wife. {If you believe this last sentence, you must also be a Q-Anon follower.}
"I still have one paying client -- Sky Mexico -- a Direct to Home satellite television provider (think DirecTV) serving Mexico and Central America (a joint venture of AT&T and Grupo
Televisa, who I started representing in 1972 when the company was created.) Sky".
Mel Masuda writes, first, of course, “ALOHA.” And he continues,
"Not much to report from out here in the mid-Pacific", and he's still enjoying semi-retirement. He continued teaching Business Law on-line during the pandemic. He reports that "Being 2,500
miles from San Francisco and Los Angeles has had some advantage for us 1,200,000 residents of Hawaii -- namely that the relative isolation of the
Islands plus the downturn in tourism (we had 10 million annually pre-pandemic and are currently down to only 1 million) has kept our pandemic toll numbers in terms of deaths (453) and
cases (28,691) relatively low, contrasted from many parts of the U.S. mainland. I've had my vaccination. Classmates, have you? BEST OF LUCK TO EVERYONE!!!
Sincerely and Aloha, Mel"
P.S. Mel is still hoping that -- post-pandemic, when travel is back to normal --"you Classmates will consider your once-in-a-lifetime vacation trip to
Hawaii -- to see, among other things, why, once I got home to Hawaii from Princeton, Yale Law, and Harvard (master's in public administration), I rarely left the Islands to go back to the U.S. mainland. My last classmate visitor was Eunice Whitney several years ago --
I eagerly await any others of you who will visit these Islands, whom Mark Twain wrote is 'the loveliest fleet of islands anchored in any ocean'.
Sincerely and Aloha, Mel, aka 'Yoda In Hawaii' "
Gene Moen writes: "The pandemic lockdown has had a rather dramatic impact on those of us who litigate civil cases. All of our trials set for after March, 2020, were
canceled and/or shifted into 2021, where the trial calendar is now very crowded. But starting in November, our local trial court started experimenting with all-zoom trials, and my firm is now
preparing for our first, a 3-week trial scheduled for May 3, 2021. In the all-zoom format, everyone is in a different location, just as in zoom meetings. Jurors are in their homes, the trial
judge is in the courtroom, the court reporter is at yet another location, and the attorneys are scattered around their various offices. We have turned our conference room into a studio, with high-tech microphones, lighting, video cameras, etc.
"About a dozen such trials have occurred in our county so far, and everyone agrees they seem to work quite well, although the defense attorneys complain that the verdicts for plaintiffs
seem to be larger. Certainly, the cost of putting on a trial is much reduced, since we no longer have $1,000 an hour experts flying in to testify. For plaintiffs’ medical malpractice attorneys,
the costs of experts can be a huge burden.
"Some judges think that, even when the pandemic is over, jurors should be allowed to continue participating from their homes. During the trials, we hear dogs barking, babies crying,
and doorbells ringing; the real world intervenes in the courtroom sanctuary. Maybe we can just close down the courthouse. For someone who is old enough to really miss the rotary
phone, the technological advances seem to be coming at us faster and faster. But it does make life interesting. Please continue being healthy and safe. I get my second shot in a couple
of days."
Ham Osborne, Jr. writes:
"My wife and I have survived the pandemic without so much as a case of the sniffles, and we have both received the COVID vaccine (Pfizer for her and Moderna for me). We both felt bad
for two or three days after our second injections, which I understand is not unusual but also not universal. The pandemic forced the cancellation of a trip to Paris and a cruise down the
Rhone River that we had planned for late August and early September of last year, and we have had no other opportunities to travel anywhere else during the pandemic. I did, however,
take a couple of day-long road trips in October to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway and see the fall foliage, and I recently took a another day-long road trip to visit the Kings Mountain and
Cowpens national battlefields that lie between Charlotte, NC and Spartanburg, SC.
"The Battle of Kings Mountain occurred in October, 1780, and the Battle of Cowpens occurred three months later in January, 1781. The Americans defeated the British in both battles,
and the American victories depleted the forces of Lord Cornwallis to such an extent that he was eventually forced
to retreat to Virginia, where he was trapped and defeated at Yorktown by American forces under the command of George Washington. Seeing and walking the battlefields at Kings
Mountain and Cowpens gave me a first-hand appreciation of how the battles unfolded and why the Americans won. American militia (essentially backwoodsmen armed with their own
hunting rifles) played pivotal roles in both battles."
Michael Reiss wrote about how he and Seattle handled Covid:
"Seattle is in the forefront in the country running civil jury trials fully remotely via Zoom in both state and federal courts. It has been quite fascinating, and quite a challenge. Every aspect
of the trial-- from sending out the initial summons to potential jurors to taking the verdict--has needed to be reimagined. I have been working with the lawyers in our firm setting up for our
first Zoom trial, which is going on right now. We configured one of our large conference rooms with appropriate lighting, microphones, backgrounds, and large screens enabling us to view
each of the jurors plus the judge, witnesses and opposing counsel throughout the proceedings. And we worked with each of our witnesses, making sure of their connections and practicing
how to testify remotely. I put together a series of webinars for our lawyers in preparation for our first trial, providing information from tech support people, several of our judges, and a jury
consultant. While some people have been reluctant to go forward with Zoom jury trials, for now they are the only way trials can be held. And some aspects are likely stay, even when
things open up a bit. For example, jury selection via Zoom is efficient, cost effective, and less onerous for jurors. In the case we are now trying, we had an initial pool of 60 potential jurors
who were questioned in a series of panels of 15, giving us a final jury of 12 plus three alternates. The jurors were in their own homes, not needing to travel to downtown Seattle, saving
them inconvenience and saving the County money. Allowing witnesses to testify remotely also seems to work well. As for our trial preparation, much of it was similar to any other jury
trial--concentrating on our story, our exhibits, and our witnesses. But we also had to take into account that jurors would be seeing everything on a screen. If doing a jury trial is considered
'theater,' then this is 'television.'
"On a slightly related note, I have been helping to coach our local Port Townsend High School team in the YMCA Washington State mock trial competition. Here in Port Townsend,
this is a voluntary, after-school activity. This year the competition was entirely via Zoom. This past weekend, our team came in first in our district and fifth overall in the State. They did a
great job; we are very proud of them."
In response to my request for vaccination experiences, Hardy Wieting explained how he got his shots:
"I live not far from 'non-sectarian' Soka University of America, founded by a prosperous Buddhist sect in Japan, on top of lovely Wood Canyon, here in Orange County. One of the two
vaccination centers in Orange County was established in the gymnasium there (the university is closed, including the lovely track where I have always run my Sunday mile). Soka has
Pfizer, which I preferred (very slightly, mainly because the tech behind it is a product of Turks who moved to Germany and star in science there -- and I found that story interesting). The
other center is across the street from Disneyland, about an hour's drive. They have Moderna.
"I got an email to make an appointment at, naturally, the Disney site. Making the appointment online, I saw that there they also had J&J, which I chose. The congratulations email
response said I would get Pfizer. When I got there, avoiding I-5, via Santiago Canyon Rd, where the hills are turning their once-a-year green, I found that in fact they did not have Pfizer, only Moderna -- plus
J&J. I got J&J."
Now, here is some more general information.
Doug Blazey is Of Counsel to the Elliott Greenleaf firm in Pennsylvania. Its webpage brings us up to date about Doug’s activities. “Blazey brings significant experience in the government and private sectors to his leadership of the firm’s environmental, energy, and natural resource practice. For 12 years, he served as Regional Counsel for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Region II. He also served as Chief Counsel for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Resources for seven years after serving for the previous seven years as Special Assistant Attorney General, Chief of the Philadelphia office, and then as Director of the Bureau of Administrative Enforcement. A trial and appellate attorney, Doug has successfully resolved many of the most complex enforcement and regulatory issues affecting business and government.”
Take a look at Doug’s photo at Blazey.
Peter Carstensen writes:
As only a nominal member of 68 because I had stayed on in the 4-year program and so became a class member, I can contribute that we have moved out of a house on one of Madison’s lakes to a condo downtown and to our surprise and delight our daughter and our three grandchildren will be buying the house from us. We have also added a bigger place in northern Wisconsin as a family meeting place, but probably not in winter. Professionally, although retired from teaching (U. Wisc. Law), I remain active as a consultant/expert witness in competition cases.
Peter D'Errico reports that his book manuscript, Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples is being sought by two publishers.
Thanks to Mike Parish for this old news about Doug Dye, his wife “Ziggy” and children Jocelyn and Kerry. After spending a dozen years in
“legal service to the poor he built a solo practice in Philadelphia after earning a masters in taxation from Temple.
Richard Epstein reports:
"I am still teaching at NYU full time and at the University of Chicago as a visiting lecturer. I also continue to hold my Fellowship at The Hoover Institution. On the personal side, my wife
and I have taken leave of the Chicago area for a fulltime home, and have purchased and renovated a home in Norwalk CT, in order to be near two of our three children and all four of our
grandchildren. Acadmically I continue on as a Director of the expanding Classical Liberal Institute at NYU, and last year published my latest book The Dubious Morality of Modern
Administrative Law (Rowman & Littlefield), and the 1th edition of Cases and Materials on Torts (12th ed. Wolter Kluwer) with my NYU colleague Catherine Sharkey. I continue to write my
column The Libertarian for The Hoover Institute, and do regular radio shows: Law Talk (with John Yoo and Troy Senik), The Libertarian (with Troy Senik) and the John Batchelor
Show on WCBS in NYC."
Jim Goetz is busy with pro bono litigation activities aimed at undoing the flood of regressive legislation coming from the Montana Legislature. Goetz, who has
argued over 100 cases in the Montana Supreme Court, recently filed an original jurisdiction petition in that court which abolishes Montana’s system of filling judicial vacancies through a
non-partisan nominating commission and anticipates more to come (guns on campus, election of Supreme Court Justices by districts instead of at-large), and the standard voter
suppression measures surfacing in many red states.
Dick Markovits, in response to my plea, wrote the following:
"My wife Inga (Yale LLM) and I have been teaching at Texas Law School since 1975. I teach Economic Efficiency Analysis, Antitrust Law, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Law, and Legal Scholarship (about the various modes of research that is done about law). Inga is now retired from teaching but not from research. She taught Comparative Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, Socialist vs. Bourgeois law (called SocBourg by the students), Family Law, and Children and the Law.
"My most recent book--published by the economics division of Springer--is titled Welfare Economics and Second-Best Theory. I am currently finishing
a two-volume study titled Antitrust Policy and Welfare Economics, which the economics division of Springer will also publish. The English title of Inga's
most recent book is Servants of Two Masters: East-German Jurists Between the Party and the Law. It has already been published in German. She is currently working on the English translation.
"We have five children (all of whom took their BAs at Yale) and twelve grandchildren. Daniel is a professor at Yale Law School; Stefanie is a professor in the Yale Department of English; Benjamin is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of London and a novelist; Julia is a professor of philosophy at Cornell; and Rebecca is the co-editor of a literary journal, “American Short Fiction.”
"Inga and I often go to Germany (where she does research and sees family and I teach) and England (where Benjamin lives and other children vacation in the summer). From 1981–1983, I was co-director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford.
"Inga and I have suffered less than most from the virus, in part because our kids call us often, substantially because we continue to see Rebecca and her family (who live in Austin) and in part because we frequently phone with friends. I find Zoom-teaching much less satisfactory than in-person teaching. I am sure the students do too.
"I occasionally think of our years at Yale Law School, but my memories are less political than those of correspondents who have kindly included me in their emails about those times.
I think of you and all our classmates with great fondness. Inga and I send our best wishes to you all (or should I write, y'all)."
Rick Ober and his wife of 47 years Carol moved a short distance to Stonebridge, a “continuing care resort community [CCRC]” near Princeton, New Jersey in
September of 2019, six months before the pandemic hit, and are very happy there. They get dinner delivered from a menu each evening! They got their Pfizer shots in January and
February due to CCRC priority. Carol keeps busy as Secretary of the Residents’ Association and has sewed over 100 children’s quilts for charity during the pandemic.
They have two daughters, one a professor of public health at the University of Oklahoma and the other a psychologist at West Virginia University, married to an epidemiologist at the CDC,
and four grandchildren. Favorite future activities are visiting grandchildren, downhill skiing, tennis and travel. Next big trip is to see the polar bears at Hudson’s Bay, Canada, postponed
from 2020.
Since February 2018 Rick has been a volunteer Legal Analyst for the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which translates math into law, and law into math, to help patch holes and fix bugs in democracy. This requires an interdisciplinary approach where statistics, mapmaking, and law can work together. Rick is co-author of the following law review articles: “Up by Their Own Bootstraps: State Legislative Attempts to Bypass the Governor During Redistricting” in the Albany Law Review, and “Laboratories of Democracy Reform: State Constitutions and Partisan Gerrymandering” in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.
He has hosted several Zoom events for the Princeton Area Alumni Association, where he is an Executive Committee member, including his own presentation on “Democracy and U.S.
Election Reform” for his fellow CCRC residents.
Mike Parish’s son Billy is married to Wahleah Johns who is Senior Advisor for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Indian Energy Policy and
Programs. She is responsible for upholding and advancing the Office of Indian Energy’s mission to maximize the development and deployment of energy solutions for the benefit of
American Indians and Alaska Natives.
Johns is a member of the Navajo (Dine) tribe and comes from northeastern Arizona. Her background is in renewable energy and community organizing, having co-founded Native Renewables, a nonprofit that builds renewable energy tribal capacity while addressing energy access. Her work with the Black Mesa Water Coalition and Navajo Green Economy Coalition has led to groundbreaking legislative victories for groundwater protection, green jobs, and environmental justice. In 2019, she was awarded the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship.
Meanwhile Mike continues to write stories and poems. Here is a sample:
EPIPHANIES
Soul, not Body
Juice, not Toddy
Calm, not Anger
Adventure, not Danger
Energy, not Sloth
The One, not the Both
The Warmth, not the Dark
The Wilderness, not the Park
Sleep not Confusion
Awareness not Delusion
Cunning can be Beautiful
Wisdom soars over Dutiful.
On February 18 Eric Schnapper spoke, along with Yale Law School Professor Akhil Amar, at the University of North Carolina zoom symposium “Equal Protection‘s
Grand Promise and Betrayals: Reconstruction, Plessy, to Bakke and Beyond: Is there a Way Forward?” Eric said, “Our presentation was an historical perspective based on the 39th
Congress and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction legislation. My talk was based on my article ‘Affirmative Action and the Legislative History of the Fourteenth
Amendment,’ published some time ago in the Virginia Law Review.”
Harrison Wellford. He and I were classmates at Davidson College and have been good friends for many years and was a major reason I wound up at the law
school. But he left us after his first year and went on to a distinguished career in law, government and business. He recently shared a summary of some of his activities after he left us:
"I have spent over 40 years in the alternative energy and political arenas as a policy advocate, senior executive of clean tech companies, entrepreneur, and regulatory and project finance lawyer. I assisted a number of renewable energy, energy efficiency, resource recovery, and environmental technology companies with private equity financing, project financing, and mergers and acquisitions.
Inspired by Simon and emboldened by early success as a lawyer and investor in new competitive power markets selling gas fired electricity to utilities, I set off on an adventure of my own. I became intrigued by the debate over global warming and read everything I could on the subject. The science finally overwhelmed my skepticism. I became convinced that the political will to act was crippled by three misconceptions: first, that the science was foggy, let’s delay until it clears; second, even if the evidence for global warming is compelling, it won’t happen on our watch—let future generations deal with it; and three, OK it’s really serious and near term (i.e. likely to diminish the quality of life of our children and grandchildren) but now it’s too late—nothing useful and cost effective can be done.
I now believe that only the willfully ignorant still believe the first; that only the deeply immoral believe the second; and that only the unimaginative and faint of heart cling to the third. In short, I decided to pursue careers in the law and public service that focused on global warming and energy security. I had no illusions about how difficult this path would be. Technology startups are tough. There are good reasons why most of them fail. There is a lot truth to the maxim that if at the outset of such a journey we knew all the difficulties we would encounter, most of us would not start out at all. But at this stage of my life, the journey in the company of brilliant colleagues and visionary engineers and scientists is reward in itself. I am convinced that if government doesn’t get in the way, the advances in technology now in the pipeline will give my children and grandchildren the secure energy future and cleaner environment they deserve.
In this spirit, after 25 years as a lawyer with the last 15 at Latham, I made in 2007 the transition to senior counsel to focus on my business interests in the renewable and alternative energy
sectors. Latham is one of the most respected law firms in the world and is blessed with extraordinary people that I will always trust and cherish but I now relate to them as friends and
client, not as partner. Latham allowed me to pursue my interests in clean energy long before it was fashionable and to take time off to serve as Vice Chairman and senior executive at
two of the largest competitive power companies in the US, both of which I helped to start. I was also allowed to take leaves of absence to coordinate pre-election planning for
Presidential transitions in 1988, 1992, 2004, and 2008. Looking back I am especially grateful to Dick Neustadt, Ralph Nader, Sen. Phil Hart, President Carter, and other leaders in
government, law, energy and finance who trusted me to plan, manage, and execute their objectives, allowing me to lead a very satisfying life." [See
energy, though it's just "in process" at this stage.]
Junius Williams has started a Podcast called "Everything's Political". . . because it is.
He writes, “You can hit me up and listen to my first five episodes at "everythingspolitical.fireside.fm.”
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka asked Junius to organize the new Community Museum in Newark, converting an old police precinct where the 1967 Rebellion started into a place for the study
of Newark Civil Rights history, and a site for peace and contemplation. He assures us, “I'm still at it!”
In a new book, Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey and his co-author, the late
former Romanian acting spy chief Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, describe, according to the publisher, Encounter Books, “why Russia remains an extremely dangerous force in the world, and they finally and definitively put to rest the question of who killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. All evidence points to the fact that the assassination—carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald—was ordered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, acting through what was essentially the Russian leader’s personal army, the KGB (now known as the FSB). This evidence, which is codified as most things in foreign intelligence are, has never before been jointly decoded by a top U.S. foreign intelligence leader and a former Soviet bloc spy chief familiar with KGB patterns and codes.”
My Chapel Hill neighbor, Alan Ziegler used Zoom to continue his activities giving remote classes and presentations to seniors on diverse topics such as "The
Efficacy of Violence for Positive Political Change," "Displaced Workers and The Future of Work in Light of Technological Advances," The Prospects and Ethics of 'Designer Babies', and
"The Implications of Treating Aging as a Disease".
The following came in response to my request for memories of law school and afterwards:
Jack Carley wrote about Victor Marrero and his handling, as a senior district court judge, in the Trump tax return case and added more about
Fred Rodell and others:
"Vic officiated at my marriage to Pia Lindstrom twenty years ago this past month (August 3) on the terrace of the then Manhattan penthouse apartment of my sister-in-law Isabella
Rossellini right before it rained. I have a picture of Vic either laughing or smiling as I delivered remarks about what I expected from a second marriage, using lyrics from Broadway
songs. I think Vic was also in the writing course, “Law and Public Opinion,” Fred “the Red” Rodell, as some called him, gave to nine students selected after reading their written
submissions on why they wanted to take the course. The idea was to write about the law in language the ordinary citizen could understand as he had advocated in a book he had written
years before. Peter Bradford was also in the class, and we chose each other to critique our weekly essays. I recall being invited to dinner at Fred’s home. When I went to the bathroom
and flipped up the toilet seat, staring back at me from the bowl was a picture of Felix Frankfurter. When Fred found out I was actually working for Richard Nixon in the 1968 Presidential
primaries (taking very long weekends by leaving Wednesday after my last class and returning Sunday night in time for Monday classes from either New Hampshire or Wisconsin), his
reaction was and remains unprintable. (Bradford carries on his tradition to this day via our email exchanges). But I remember Fred as one of my favorite teachers.
"Other recollections.
The very first exam I took was Tax. I was very nervous as a new transfer student as I looked around the room at my classmates. They seemed so confident. Professor Bittker told us we
could bring anything or anyone (including an actual lawyer) to the exam. One classmate rolled in a metal file cabinet containing index cards summarizing every case in the casebook we
used. I sat next to Richard Markovitz whom I did not know. As I was trying to understand the second question of three on the test, something about the effects of a Section 1231
depreciation, Markovitz got up and left. He was finished! Oh my God, I thought, what am I doing here when I am still trying to figure out what the second question of three is asking, and
he is already done! I did not know he was to be at the top of our class. And there was Clyde Summers’ course on Urban Planning. His examination was a take-home test handed out
after the Wednesday class and due the following Monday at 9 A.M. with a limitation of 2500 words. On Saturdays the Library closed up tight at 5 P.M., but somehow several of us
managed to get in after hours to continue working in the virtual dark to avoid outside detection. Or Bart Tiernan wandering through the halls not having written a
word but thinking about Guido’s 24-hour take-home Estates and Gift Tax exam in which he devised a transaction using the name of every student in the class. And finally my moot court
opponent was Richard Epstein. Need I say more about how it went? Richard and I became friends and shared a one bedroom apartment in New York City at 40 West 88th Street as
summer clerks when the West Side was not what it is today. I remember seeing a man walking down our block with a huge knife strapped to his leg. My summer clerk class included the
future Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who did not get a job offer. Richard was at Paul Weiss where they ran out of assignments to give him because he finished them so fast. As I reflect on those
days over 50 years ago with all the social tumult at that time in the country, they were good days. I treasure my time at Yale Law School."
Late last year I persuaded Chris May to tell me more about his connection to a certain red-nosed reindeer. The result has been here on our class website, as an
extension of our Found page since last Xmas: Rudolph.
Note: Chris tells his dad’s story in detail on a new podcast available at: podcast.
Complete original manuscript can be read at: Red.
Jim Mezzanotte made up for us not hearing from him for a while by reporting on his move to eastern North Carolina in detail as follows:
"We are in little Washington (NC to those who are foreign to our area). You can come anytime and are always welcome. I have had both Covid 19 shots and Judy gets her second on Friday. We have a house within a gated waterfront community and have a boat at the community marina. All of my classmates are welcome to join us. We only have 1 guest bedroom, so lodging is on a first come first served basis or by reservation.
"We have fared well while the world around us is going crazy. I have simply followed the advice of Jesus and do not worry about tomorrow. As a consequence, I often get asked to
'go back out and get my mask.'
"By God’s Grace, I have lived a good life and I am not going to ruin what is left by spending all my time worrying about whether I will die or not. It is a great time to live by Faith.
"We have been blessed with 5 children ages 48-58, 13 Grand Children ages 8-32 and one step granddaughter has 2 girls. In the next few days, we will be welcoming our first Great Grandson. Judy is waiting for the call to go to Ohio.
As for the rest of the world, all I can say is that it is mind boggling. I have been bragging about my law school friends, D.G. Martin and Stan Sanders, to anyone who will listen. I do not imagine we could be farther apart politically and have never let it affect our friendship. I do not understand how we have come to a point where so many people think you have to hate everyone who doesn’t think like you think. Yale Law School was a wonderful place where you could vehemently disagree all day long and still love each other. I mean is not that what marriage is all about.
Sorry that I took so long to get to the matter at hand, you’re needing some words of wisdom or fancy.
"I really wanted to send you something when Ralph Winter died and waited too long. Therefore, I am going to take advantage of this second chance.
"I was taught how to play billiards by Ralph Winter and Bob Bork. We played a number of times per week for 3 years. About halfway through the fall semester of year 3, they asked me if I was going to take a class from them before I graduated. I told them that I was just saving the best for last. Then I was honest with them and let them know that I did not think I would ever have a use for evidence or antitrust except for the bar exam. They responded that they thought I would probably wind up selling used cars or insurance. I think they were jealous that Kessler was my favorite professor and that I took both of his insurance courses. I have always been a little disappointed that I never got to do either. However, I did wind up doing quite a bit of work for Bruton Smith, who is one of the largest car dealers in the country, and my daughter Cathy owns an insurance agency in Clinton, CT. The same address where my Connecticut Law firm is located. I also drafted a large number of Insurance trusts over the years and still do my daughter’s company’s legal work.
"In any event, I did take a class from each my last semester. Early in my career, I shared an office with Bob Bork at Jack Hollerans’ (class of 55, I think, with Guido) office.
"As you know, by the time I graduated I had 2 children and not much money left. Therefore, I did not have enough money to buy books for both and chose to buy the one for antitrust.
Ralph’s class used a book written by Ralph. He had a large number of criminal cases in the book and most of them involved Italians. He called me his resident expert. (I was never sure
if he was referring to New Haven, Italians, criminals or all of the above). In any event, he called on me about as often as Kessler did, and I can’t say that it wasn’t fun or enjoyable. We had
a very good relationship. One day he called on me about a brand-new case at the very beginning of class. I responded, 'Mr. Winter you know better than that'. He responded, 'Better
than what'? I said 'calling on me before the case has been discussed. You know that I didn’t have enough money to buy a book.' He responded 'Mezzanotte (no Mr.) I did not know that.
What is wrong with you? Look at the people around you every day.' A large number of people like Epstein and a group of other Law Journal members, who were there for the same reason
I was, sat all around me. I asked him if he thought those classmates would be remembered by the rest of us and he said of course they would. I then asked if he thought I would be
remembered, and he replied 'how could they ever not remember a character like you.'
I replied, 'Mr. Winter it won’t make any difference five years from now why they remember me, the important thing is that they do.'
"Fast forward about five or six years and I had a visit from Ralph with regard to his need for some tax planning relating to a business venture with his brother-in-law. When that was
completed, he asked me to do an estate plan for him. Some months after the estate plan was completed and signed, he stopped by my office to ask for an invoice for the work I had done.
I told him there would not be a charge and that he should consider the work as a return for the gift that he gave me for a grade in evidence. He asked what the grade was, and I told him
a 'C'. He replied, 'I gave you a C and you thought it was a gift and then you did my estate plan? How could that happen?' I then reminded him of our dialogue in class and we had a good
laugh. We remained friends for a long time. He arranged, at his doing and without my knowledge, for me to start a tax department at Jacobs, Jacobs and Grudberg in New Haven. Later
he sent a friend of his, who went to Harvard Law and had a masters degree in tax from NYU whose resume read like my practice, to work for me at my law firm, Mezzanotte and Leitze.
"He had introduced me to Ira Grudberg while I was in law school because he was always trying to get me to go into trial work and join the barristers Union. Ralph and Ira were roommates at Yale and Yale Law School. They then married roommates from the Catholic women’s college at the top of the hill. I was told by Guido at our last reunion that he [Ralph] never really recovered from his wife’s death before he died.
"Probably a little-known fact: Ralph was called to Washington by President Nixon during the early stages of Watergate. He declined the request to represent him. Although he held
political views similar to Nixon, Ralph was a man of principles and stood by them."
********
DG: Last year the North Caroliniana Society honored me with their annual award. Thanks to Hardy Wieting and the web team for our class web page, the booklet the society produced
is available at booklet.
Winter 2020-2021
[Nadine Taub tribute - see our Alas page; Class notes edition is here.]
Hardy Wieting deserves our thanks for his work collecting information and creating our class webpage. At my request he offered this brief
explanation: "As many of you are already aware, our class has had its own website since the first of the year, to which a number of you have already contributed: 1968yls.org. The home
page contains general news, updated periodically. It also reprints the Class Notes and contains links to class documents, like the reunion book we did for the 50th. There's a page for
memories of classmates, and another for memories of profs. The Found page contains stuff about those who did not contribute a page to the 50th book. The Alas page contains
obits. There's a health (Fettle) page (which also contains book reviews you wish to submit) and gallery pages, one of which displays the work of our three classmates who have become
professional-class photographers. The [fascinating] Roots page honors our forebearers, particularly our parents, by telling something of their story; the page is growing slowly, but already there is
absorbing content there.
A class gmail address has been created for dialogue with the website, 1968yls@gmail.com. (Please do your Roots and send there).
The N page stands for "Native" and is about class involvement with Native Americans, including, recently, Native Hawaiians.
In order to add a degree of privacy and candor to the site, the site is basically open just to classmates. The above link takes you to a 'Classmates Website' page where there are no
further links, but where there's a 'key', known only to classmates, that opens the rest of the site. Classmates who need help with the key should send a request to 1968yls@gmail.com."
Bob Baker, at my request, gives us a brief summary of his life of service. He “1) practiced law 30 years, 3 at Milbank and 27 at Jones Day (Cleveland, Los Angeles, Tokyo (I opened the Tokyo office) and Chicago; 2) Government Official as Budget Director and Finance Director of State of Ohio (part of the team that got a personal and corporate income tax passed by the Ohio General Assembly, and Finance Director of the Cities of Cleveland and Shaker Heights, Ohio; and 3) NGO, Presbyterian Church (USA) working in Albania and Kosovo during and after the Kosovo War. Finally retired.”
Peter Bradford shared a fleeting memory:
“I spent much of April, 1968, doing advance work for Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in the Indiana primary. As I recall (very possibly wrongly), Indiana had a conservative Democratic governor who strongly preferred Senator Hubert Humphrey. In addition, Senator Kennedy had just jumped into the race, so the Indiana primary was heavy going. I don't even remember who won. What I do remember is a benefit concert in a Purdue University auditorium put on by a duo of whom I had never heard until that evening, Simon and Garfunkel. They played a number of their signature songs, including ‘Scarborough Fair,’ ‘Parsley Sage,’ ‘Bridge over Troubled Water,’ and ‘Sound of Silence.’ If I remembered a few of my classes nearly as clearly as I remember that evening, I suppose that I might have become a lawyer.”
Junius Williams writes, “The most important thing I have done after retirement from Rutgers Newark as the Director of the Abbott Leadership Institute, is to
stay busy doing things I like to do. ( Not that ALI wasn't enjoyable, but now I have to raise less money). I just started a podcast called "Everything's Political" which can be found at
Junius, and all your favorite podcast sites (except Apple....we're having growing pains with Apple).I hope you will enjoy it. Also, Ras Baraka appointed me Official Historian of Newark NJ, and asked me to oversee the development of a museum on Newark Civil Rights History at the old 4th police precinct in Newark, as part of his decision to take 5% of the police budget and place it in the hands of civilians to work on violence prevention. Mayor Baraka is the son of poet/playright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) who I worked with while serving as the first campaign manager of Ken Gibson, the first black mayor of Newark, in 1970. Having lots of fun.”
Michael Gross gives us his long-promised review of his most interesting career:
“I am still working on my first case, now a writing project. It involves Indian education. Along with five other YLS classmates I took a job as a Poverty War lawyer on the Navajo Reservation. Upon arrival in late July 1968, I was immediately assigned to a case involving a remote public high school in western New Mexico serving an isolated Navajo community. The school had just been closed due to falling enrollment. No provision had been made for its 50 Navajo students to attend any other accessible high school.
“After a failed law suit to reopen the closed school I suggested the community start its own school from scratch. The idea was electric. The community voted unanimously to form a Ramah Navajo ‘School Board’ and incorporated it. A small foundation provided $2500 for a trip to Washington, D.C., to seek money for a community run school. Only one Indian controlled school even existed then; also on the Navajo Reservation it demonstrated that Navajos could operate their own school successfully. But no provision for its replication had been made.
“In February 1970 I accompanied five Ramah Navajo community leaders to D.C. on a quest for federal assistance. With help from another YLS-er, Bobbie Greene Kilberg, YLS ’69. who worked in the Nixon White House, we succeeded. In broken English the five explained their needs to Congress. The Washington Post did a story about them. That led to a written $365,000 commitment from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Ramah Navajos to create their own high school. In late June 1970 the Huntley-Brinkley News Show presented a five minute peek at the novel school. Other Indian tribes demanded the same thing. That led to a new federal law called The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. The new statute gave all American tribes the right to run their own federally-financed Indian schools and other programs by contract. Congress later passed a law codifying that right. P.L. 93-638. I note that several other of our classmates went to work for the DNA Navajo legal services program. They recorded similar successes. As I understand it, our class was the only YLS class whose leading employer after graduation was other than a Wall Street law firm.”
Norman Leventhal shared the following:
"Although in semi-retirement and working from home, I continue to represent a subsidiary of long-time client Grupo Televisa, S.A. (Mexico), now approaching 49 years of continuing representation. Sky Mexico, a joint venture of Televisa and AT&T, provides direct-to-home TV service to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and still requires both domestic and international regulatory advice as well as legal assistance in contract negotiation on a variety of technology subjects. The work is still enjoyable and rewarding from a variety of standpoints.
“I have also increased my participation in the ABA Pro Bono Military Project, recently handling four different cases for members of the military on a pro bono basis. This effort is very rewarding in terms of “giving back” to the community that risks all for the rest of us. I have also filled my little spare time to work on electing Democrats around the country; I will not bother to bore you with the reasons why — they are clearly self-evident.
“My wife, Ilene, and I continue to travel whenever we can and, despite her many health issues (none of which, thankfully, have been life-threatening), she continues to push through no matter her then current medical problems. Our recently planned trip to Antarctica and South Asia (Singapore, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India), however, had to be rescheduled due to the Coronavirus pandemic; we were more than ready to go but the countries on our itinerary no longer welcome Americans. Go figure; thank you Mr. Trump.
“We are anxious to add the 7th and last continent to our list of places visited as well as another 20+ countries to the 54 already seen. These are captured in my first published book of photographs (“Our World…As I See It” ©2013); available for a modest price on request. I am now starting work on a second edition which is planned for publication in 2023. We love to travel ever since our first trip to France in 1984, and plan on continuing until we are too old (which, hopefully, will be much later in time than others, sadly, have experienced)."
Robert McManus has just turned 80. Adding to what he wrote for our 50th Reunion book, he recalls and opines, “I retired a decade ago. But after that, I won my first ever jury trial, a contractor fraud case, and defended judgment in my client’s favor five years ago, doing an oral argument in the DC Court of Appeals 30 hours after leaving Athens at the end of an Aegean cruise. Cool! Nancy and I have traveled extensively in the past decade: diving the Barrier Reef, safari, Sicily, US western National Parks, several Caribbean diving vacations. Our wings have been clipped by the ‘Rona’ (as my daughter tells me the cool kids call it), which gives me ample time to dabble in flight simulation (Lockheed-Martin’s Prepar3D, and very recently MickeySoft’s FS2020) and to complain about the state of our country. Speaking of which: Did you guys know that the founder of the armed anti-American group the Oath Keepers is a YLS grad? Also the political hacks Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh! WTF has the admissions office been smoking since we left?”
Zygmunt Plater recalled,
“I suppose you could say that I was a low-accomplishment student during my law school years (as I recall it I was about 13 years old in maturity and in academic terms) but I did spend time fishing. (A game warden caught me fishing without a license in the Mill River out by Sleeping Giant in Hamden, and mercifully let me off with a promise that I'd buy the license retroactively.) The fishing produced the Sup. Ct. case from Tennessee that I did with my students (link: goo.gl/ecQ158), and last Spring I got the 2020 ABA SEER Lifetime Achievement Award. I regard it as a sort of pre-posthumous recognition. And have you ever checked out Mike Gross's story of avoiding Vietnam? The first week of law school he told us all he was on presidential appeal. It went upland down, and then he lost and got his draft notice. As I remember it, there was a clambake party thrown for him on the East Haven beach where somebody was house-sitting, and they had a touch football game and Mike fell and cracked a leg bone (the story is best if he does so clutching the winning touchdown throw). And when the doctor said ‘All it needs is a tight wrap, though I could put in pins,’ Mike yelped, ‘Put in pins!’ = 4F = Goodbye, General Hershey. At least this affiant remembers nothing exactly to the contrary.”
Michael Reiss: In September, he “gave a presentation on African American voting rights, working in Holmes County, MS, and the return trip to the South that Shelly and I made in Feb/March of this year … returning to the Pacific Northwest just as Covid began to become generally recognized up here and elsewhere. The presentation was for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Port Townsend, the church that Shelly and I belong to and support. They are having a series of weekly conversations on “truth” .. “justice” .. and “healing,” and my presentation kicked off the series.”
Mike’s presentation was recorded and I will send link to the class as soon as I can.
Jonathan Shepard and Michael Smith 1972 recently exchanged memories about their VISTA work in the 1960s. Michael started with our class but finished later, as he explains in his exchange with Jonathan.
Michael first wrote, “As a fellow member (at least originally) of the YLS class of '68, I was interested to read in your "Roots" entry that you, too, were a VISTA Volunteer in NYC in 1969. I'm not sure you and I ever crossed paths at the law school (I missed a lot of classes, and eventually dropped out in the fall of '67 without completing 2nd year, came back in Spring of '71, finally graduated in '72), but after I dropped out, I joined VISTA in Jan. of 1968 and watched all hell break loose the rest of that year, while I was busy attempting to be a community organizer in the South Bronx. When the Nixon people took over in 1969, all hell broke loose within VISTA as they tried to clean out all the radicals among us who were causing a lot of trouble. Where were you assigned and what were you doing that year? Did you see or hear about any of the upheaval that was going on (within VISTA)?That was really when my true education began. A fascinating time.”
Jonathan replied, “We did the same kind of work. Welfare rights and landlord tenant. I would go to court with 20 or 30 residents of a building who would testify that they hadn’t had heat all winter. The courts refused to take that testimony, saying that the only reliable testimony was a building inspector who put an actual thermometer on a radiator and held it there for a long period of time, meaning several hours. I did finally get a landlord put in jail for a while, but it was my only victory. It was really upsetting. The things that I saw in buildings, water dripping out of ceilings and with every drop a roach fell to the floor, so walking across the floor was crunchy-crunchy critter time. As for welfare rights, Ginette Washington, I think her name was, who was the head of the wealthy rights organization in the city, as I remember, kept urging everybody to have more babies, since welfare was based on the number of children that her mother had. It was difficult to listen to. We then went on rent strikes with single room occupancies on the west side, where people bought buildings and then paid bums to piss and poop in the halls and scream at night, All in an attempt to drive out the elderly who were there in single rooms with their electric heat plates used for cooking. In one case the landlord won and I wound up, if I didn’t already tell you, with an anxiety attack in which I thought I was dying, with all these elderly people standing over me and saying too bad, he was such a nice young man. Plus I lived with two guys, again I probably told you, one of whom said that he had murdered his sergeant and the other one had all sorts of wounds across his neck and wanted to kill me because, as I’m sure I wrote, I was going out with a black woman, at least so she told me. All of this certainly had an impact on me, which remains to this day.”
Mike responded, “We came into the program through a terrific (and mind-bending) training program in the South Bronx sponsored by a very radical outfit called Wel-Met (no idea what that name was supposed to represent). Mostly did welfare rights organizing (highlighted by a lengthy several-days sit-in at the Melrose Welfare Center in May of '68), and some tenant organizing. Succeeding generations of trainees tired of the frustration of getting nowhere with rent strikes, so decided to up the ante by picketing and demonstrating in Westchester County outside the private homes of the absentee landlords! That caught the attention of the incoming Nixon Administration and some LBJ holdovers who were trying to protect their jobs by firing all the radical training folks and cracking down on the activist VISTAs. The whole thing was more than a little radicalizing for me (a now fully recovered former liberal Republican prior to VISTA and the turmoil of 1968-69), and an eye-opening education.”
Thanks to both Jonathan and Mike for sharing this reminder to times gone by.
Patricia Skigen shares the following report on her chaotic times:
“Our recent update follows (unfortunately, not an “Upper”):
“Late February to late March 2020 was tough; within four weeks, we lost four family members: my brother, his wife and two first cousins (only one, a cousin, from COVID). Then came the night of June 6, the closest I’ve ever been to a dangerous riot. Although my husband managed to sleep through it, the sounds of wailing sirens, circling helicopters, exploding fireworks and breaking glass and the strange sight and acrid smell of smoke from nearby burning cars and buildings awakened me every two hours or so. The Staples, Subway, Macy’s and Walgreen’s within a half a block of the entrance to our Chicago apartment building had their windows smashed, and hangers from clothing looted from Macy’s lay strewn along the road directly behind our building. The following day, plywood boarding appeared on every store front within a two block radius of us. Things were quieter the following nights, thanks to then 9 pm to 6 am curfew, the freezing of access to the bridges leading in and out of the downtown area, and the nightly shutdown of all public transportation. During those early days of the protests, the Chicago police showed unusual restraint, even when standing up to the looters and others participating in the demonstrations for reasons other than peaceful protest, but the restraint dissipated in the following weeks, partly in response to actions taken by those intent upon disrupting peaceful protests or engaging in organized looting. … All this in the midst of a pandemic that would have been more easily foreseen and controlled if we had had honest and thoughtful leadership at the federal level.
“Speaking of the pandemic, it has been frustrating not to have seen and have held our youngest grandchildren, a 5 ½ year old boy and his 16 month old sister, since late February even though we now live in the same city. We were scheduled to visit them a few weekends ago, but travel restrictions imposed in connection with planned demonstrations for that weekend made it impossible to do so. The following week, Gary flew to NYC for his periodic post lung surgery CT scan and doctors’ appointments, which meant re-quarantining ourselves upon his return.
“Life these days consists primarily of Zoom Pilates and art classes, reading, cooking, TV documentaries and mini-series and online shopping (according to Gary, I’m doing my best to keep the neighborhood businesses alive) – and oh, yes, multiple donations to the Kentuckian challenging Mitch McConnell and to other candidates running against Senators too fearful of their reelection prospects to oppose Donald Trump’s divisive policies and rhetoric. When did our country’s citizens start prioritizing party allegiance over all other concerns? I fear for what that portends for the Constitution, our country, our children and future generations.
The reading and the Zoom classes have been good, but without an empathetic and less self-centered body politic and museums, opera, theater, and family , we feel like shadows of our former selves.
Michael Parish (michaelparish9@gmail.com) put his thoughts about our current trying times into the following poem:
Because we had nothing much to do,
Pandemic, you know—of course you know--
And the sky was turning gray from its darkening blue
But the night hadn’t started its street-lamped glow,
We decided to go inside, sliding the door open
For a minute or two, then shutting it fast.
I guess we were hope against hope against hopin’
For anything good on TV, not the usual gas.
When we turned around we saw something strange,
A hummingbird aflight with its beak to the screen.
Then as we got closer, now within eye range
Saw something I think no one’s ever seen--
On the door’s outer side and alone was much more—
Another hummingbird, a twin of the first one
With its beak just touching the one’s inside the door
And looking like it was coming undone
Out of loneliness and solitude, in a tough time like this.
They seemed to be mirrored in each other apart
And inside an aura of all that they missed,
So we opened the slide with a kiss from the heart.
* See footnote at bottom of far left column
CLASS NOTES*
Riper/More Mature/Earlier
Vintage Class Notes 2001-2009
Organized by person, available as webpage
file or as .doc file. (We're missing 2010-17).
Summer 2020
I have asked my classmates, in addition to sharing news, to write up their memories of law school and their professional lives.
Put Brown stepped up to the plate and knocked a home run that should inspire the rest of us to record and share with each other.
Put writes:
I really don’t have a very interesting story to tell. I wrote my senior paper for Charles Black on the Torrey Canyon oil spill and water pollution regulations in the United States and elsewhere. I suppose I imagined that I might become either an admiralty or an environmental lawyer. As things turned out, I did quite a lot of environmental work at my law firm after I arrived, probably because I had just finished deeply researching that broad subject area and was the one most familiar with the nuances. It did not take me long to realize, however, that being an environmental lawyer at a large firm meant that I would represent polluters. I felt more comfortable on the other side of the table and ended up being deeply involved in environmental work at the statewide and, more diligently, at the local level. I was the vice chairman and chairman of the land acquisitions committee for 10 years of the Connecticut Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, chairman of the 4,500-acre McLean Game Refuge in Simsbury and Granby, a founding member in 1972 of the Granby Land Trust and an active participant and occasional president of that later organization ever since. I helped write the Connecticut inland wetlands regulations, co-authored a study on Connecticut land use law for the United States Senate, served on the Granby Planning and Zoning Commission for 36 years, was a probate judge for four years and, by appointment by Connecticut’s chief justice, served as a probate magistrate with statewide jurisdiction for a couple of years. I found my work in the probate area to be deeply satisfying, because I could help people through the most personally wrenching crises in their lives. I was not the passive umpire calling balls and strikes. Instead, I could be an active participant as the parties in contested cases worked through their disagreements and, when it seemed appropriate to do so, I could offer solutions they might not of thought about. I tried not to be intrusive, but to be viewed as being impartial, willing to listen and helpful. I hope others saw me that way, but one never knows. I also had served for three years on the board of selectmen, so, when you add it all up, I had an elected office in Granby for 43 years and an appointed one for two more.
I’ve been an active participant in the work of the Connecticut Land Conservation Council. It did not take me long to understand that, if I am to contribute anything to society, I can be most effective working at the local level, which I’ve done in a lot of other ways, as well. My other passion has been historic preservation, and I have served on the boards of the Connecticut Historical Society and Historic Deerfield. I also have written articles and lectured at various museums on American furniture, Russia leather and other topics. While I did create and lead a corporate trust practice area at the firm which became nationally prominent, my greatest pleasures have come from my community activities.
Every day, weather and other obligations permitting, Nannie and I hike in the nearby woods. We have traveled the same paths thousands of times and never grow tired of them. They are certainly different every day, or we are. I helped to assure the preservation of much of the land and that will be the only lasting contribution I will have made to the place we have come to love so much.
Nannie and I are healthy, we think, happily married and proud of our children and grandchildren, with whom we love to spend time when we can. I am deeply thankful for the training I received at Yale and the confidence its pedigree gave me both at work and in my community activities.
* * *
Put also gave a shout out to Paul Knierim, class of 1989. As a Connecticut probate judge, Put worked very closely with Knierim and praises him. “Over the years, Paul has received many honors, but I doubt very much whether he has told his fellow law school classmates of any of them. He is exceedingly modest and so would never tout his own accomplishments, although he is quick to praise the work others do. Most recently, he received a significant national honor.”
* * *
Peter d'Errico gave this short reminiscence about Prof. Moore, from whom he learned basic and advanced civil procedure as well as bankruptcy:
Professor Moore was the only teacher in my law school career who, on his own, broached the question whether a particular rule was "unjust" (it was a rule against retroactive application of constitutional changes in criminal law, which he contrasted with the civil rule) [He referred to the 1967 Supreme Court case, Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, which held that retroactive application of a Constitutional rule barring use of ‘tainted" identification evidence’ 'would seriously disrupt the administration of our criminal laws.'" 388 U.S. 293, 300. Stovall was disapproved of by Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314, 107 S. Ct. 708, 93 L. Ed. 2d 649 (1987)].
Moore also enjoyed joking about law, once saying a simplified rule defining a proper civil complaint meant that “Vomit on a piece of paper will be a valid federal complaint.” [criticizing Dioguardi v. Durning, 139 F.2d 774 (2d Circuit, 1944)] On another occasion, Moore referred to dissenting opinions as “subversive literature.”
His students savored an apocryphal story about Moore arguing a procedural issue at the Supreme Court: When a Justice asked him how he squared his argument with a different interpretation in Moore's Federal Practice, Moore responded, “I've changed my mind!”
Our class dedicated its yearbook to Professor Moore.
* * *
[See our Alas page for Rob Agus.]
* * *
Richard Epstein writes, “The best news is that my son Elliot and his husband took home a gorgeous Naomi Alice in an all night right from Cincinnati two days after she was born on
March 10. All doing well. Three other grandchildren in Mamaroneck also doing well. Still working, with a new book out this week, ‘The Dubious Morality of the Modern Administrative
State,’ and a new edition of a casebook, ‘Cases and Materials on Torts’ (12 ed.) with Catherine Sharkey. Still am running the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU with Mario Rizzo of the
econ department, and have a regular column, The Libertarian, and a pod cast by the same name. Pod. Working away on articles and speeches, but am slowed down like everyone else from the CV. No plans to retire, as my wife Eileen and I divide our time between NYU, the University of Chicago and the Hoover Institution on the Stanford Campus.”
Mathea Falco reports, “Peter Tarnoff and I are taking great delight in our first grandchild, Zoe Tarnoff , who is now seven months old. Her sunny temperament is a great distraction from the daily news.”
Jim Goetz is still active in his litigation practice, “although I’m not going full bore. I just argued in Federal Court in Missoula Montana an important summary judgment motion regarding
lands/roads on the Flathead Indian Reservation. I have represented for many years the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes.”
Jim continues his interest in Montana’s stream access cases. He handled the two seminal access cases in Montana in the mid-80’s on the Beaverhead and Dearborn Rivers.
Thanks to and Hardy Wieting, we have news about Matt Zwerling. Matt is dealing with multiple health issues at the Belmont Hills California Silverado facility, which posted an interview with Matt headlined “A resident's lifelong loyalty to the Golden State Warriors,” with the following lead-in. “Matt Zwerling has been a Golden State Warriors fan since the 70's! Ever since seeing Rick Barry play on the court in '74, he has never stopped supporting them and stayed loyal to them through their ups and downs. Even now, he continues to watch the Warriors' games at the Silverado Belmont Hills community to show his support. So much so that it has become quite a tradition here at our community where even some of his fellow residents and associates join him to cheer on the Bay Area team!”
Matt’s interview was posted at Interview.
* * *
Mike Gross promises sometime soon to give us a detailed memory of his long time work in legal services for the Navajo communities. But I persuaded him to give us a preview, which is below:
From the beginning of my career in July 1968 at a Poverty War legal services program for Navajo Indians in the Southwest I’ve been representing my first client. A remote Navajo community in western New Mexico called Ramah. Their need for legal services concerns a single issue--their survival as a viable Indian community. Despite two victories in the Supreme Court and significant input into passage of a new Indian policy called Self-Determination, their future is still uncertain. I’m now trying to write up the story. Meanwhile, I’ve reconnected with buddies from the two classes after ours. Tom Galbraith, ’69, who worked for the same Navajo legal services program I did. Every summer he and his Navajo wife, a skilled seamstress and artist, escape the heat in Phoenix by renting a house in Santa Fe; Richard Hughes, ’70, who joined the same Navajo legal services program I did and also practices Indian law in Santa Fe; and Hugh Moore, ’69, from Nashville, Tenn. whose family and he were luckily not directly affected by the recent tornado. Hughes, Moore and I started the Yale Advocate, a weekly YLS tabloid, mentored by the one-of-a-kind Professor Fred Rodell. Started in the spring of 1968 the paper lasted a few years before evaporating. I enjoyed our recent reunion, especially the two-hour discussion at the end. It seems we’re still children of the we-need-to-fix-the-world generation.
* * *
Brenda Kissam, who was married to one of our very favorite classmates, the late Flip Kissam, shared the following:
“Bill and Mijo Horwich came through Burlington VT last August and stopped to visit for a few days en route to France. Even though the Horwichs and the Kissams lived far apart after Flip and Bill graduated from Yale, we always savored the occasions when we could get together, picking up the thread of our long friendship with great ease. I was heartened that that was still true, even in the absence of the always easygoing Flip.
“In the department of family news, Flip’s granddaughter Eliza, a junior at Brown, was sent home last week from her spring semester abroad program in Chile - a big disappointment
of course. And grandson Simon, a freshman at Williams, was similarly sent home, thwarting, among other things, a promising track season at Williams. Small disappointments but
disappointments nonetheless.” Brenda is at (brkissam@comcast.net)
Mike Parish added to Brenda’s report about Bill Horwich, saying the he “is back from his annual 4-6month sojourn to Europe, this time Italy and not France, and had a knee replaced at the end of February.”
Mike's daughter, Maya, “had her first child at age 43 on October 16, 2019, a baby girl named Zephyr Adira Leroy, since Zephyr is the Greek name for the west Wind, which brought her and her husband together on the big island of Hawaii. As so often happens, he had asked a mutual friend to look after his dog while he was in Hawaii finding pet friendly lodging and Maya, upon finding out that the dog had a male owner, asked why her pal hadn't already introduced her to him. It was done, and then thoroughly done, as witness the new grandchild.”
Gene Moen writes, “I haven’t kept in touch with our classmates in Seattle, although I understand Bill Rutzick, of counsel to a large personal injury firm, still participates in some cases. My firm is celebrating our 40th year in practice, and I still work full-time. We have two partners and three associate attorneys (one of which is my oldest daughter, Catherine Mee Moen) and still limit our practice to plaintiff medical malpractice cases. I intend to continue active trial work as long as I can (I will be 80 in July). I have a very low boredom threshold, and this kind of practice is never boring. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had a boring day in the 50 years I’ve been a trial attorney. My wife and I will have our 50th wedding anniversary this year. She wants to celebrate that, but I encouraged her to wait for our 75th. Now, that would be worth celebrating!”
Hamilton Osborne sent this in late March: “My wife and I are sheltering in place in our home in Columbia, SC. Our daughter and her husband, who live in Bronxville, NY, drove down last Sunday, bringing their 17-month-old daughter with them. They expect to remain with us until sometime in May, possibly longer. Fortunately, they can both work remotely from our home, and my wife and I can assist in attending to their little girl, giving them time to devote to their work.
“Bill Slattery and his wife Margaret also live in Bronxville, which is in Westchester County and immediately adjacent to New Rochelle, an area heavily affected by the coronavirus. I spoke with Bill by telephone yesterday afternoon. Bill said that he and Margaret are sheltering in place in their home and are ordering all their groceries on-line.
“So far, everyone in my household is healthy, as are Bill and Margaret. I am cautiously optimistic that the social-isolation policies now in effect here and elsewhere will slow or even halt the spread of the coronavirus, but the effects of those policies might not become apparent for several more weeks. By the time this report is published, the effects will probably be known.”
Clifford Pearlman is the best collector of news about our class and the law school, some of which I can share with you. But better yet, write Clifford and ask him to put you on his email list.
One of his great offerings was a link to some fine music from the late Denny Greene, '84. Denny.
“Don't know Denny on sight?” Clifford asks and then answers, “He's the only one who sounds and looks like Little Anthony.”
Clifford continues, “If you go to 1:56
you can see Denny five feet from fame with Leslie Gore doing ‘You Don't Own Me.’ They should have put this on Voyager's golden record with Johnmy B. Goode.”
Denny died of esophageal cancer in 2015 at 61.
About his own family, Clifford writes, “My wife Lynn is devastated the quadrennial International Club Dragon Boat Championship will not be held this August (in Aix-les-Bains, France). What a tax deductible business trip it was going to be!!! Lynn was hoping to reprise her gold medal win from four years ago. We are hoping to see our older son Justin, a Vice Provost at Columbia, not later than 18 months from now when he emerges from the university's 24/7/52/366 planning, implementation and finger crossing with regard the current unpleasant health inconvenience. He of course feels the same about our 2nd grade grandson Leo. Younger son Zach is in Santa Monica responsible for his start up's operations in several countries. He has introduced to Santa Monica the Philly tradition of throwing your sneakers up over an electricity wire when the school year ends. In hipster Santa Monica, instead, they tie start up company branded coffee mugs together and toss them up when the start up folds. Lynn had some elective surgery earlier this year and will be fine, though it will take longer than expected to completely heal, which would not have gotten in the way of the dragon boat competition. She is one tough woman. I have decided, like one tough hockey player, not to shave or cut my hair until she is discomfort-free.”
* * *
Zygmunt Plater shared the following report and memory: "Like everyone I am trembling about the heavy burdens of the pandemic, where merely “flattening out the curve” is considered our primary available strategy. Another bitter lesson of the foolishness of an electoral college victory for a shaky shallow host of a fake game-show. I am doing what little I can to hasten and prepare for the replacement of the current incumbent. And trying to figure how to mitigate the flood of regressive judges.
Memories: Fred Rodell, chasing a grinning woman friend down the stairs in Sterling, shouting, “Poopsie, I’m going to catch you.” Doubt you can print that either.
How about Alex Bickel, having taught Con Law as basically an extended, loud-pitched in-class conversation with Bruce Ackerman, then giving us a final exam that asked exclusively for technical details of the text of the Constitution, like name each of the specifically-delegated powers of the President."
Zyg also says that he might “retire from full-time teaching in 2022; maybe.”
* * *
Bob Sable discussed Hardy Wieting’s inspired reactions to his examination of our class’s reunion handbook.
So, what is this enthusiasm about out reunion handbook?
He writes, “I've been reading it more closely these past few days -- and what a remarkable document it is, something I did not really realize when I first looked at it. The collected
experiences are fascinating in and of themselves, but it is the candor with which people have explained their lives since 68 that really blows me away. Small things like Bill Iverson
teaching math in high school, Norm Leventhal's photo-website, Jon Shepard's roommates one stabbing the other (admittedly this
is not so small), working in places like the East Carolines (I had to look this up). I could go on -- and on. Fascinating. And revelations, like our own Mike Reiss saying: "I served
under Eleanor Holmes Norton, then Clarence Thomas, trying cases including a major sex discrimination class action; then representing Thomas himself in one interesting matter."
In response to our requests for memories, Mark Schantz wrote, “Best I can do: There is unanimous agreement that DG was the best one-legged hooper in the class."
I am not sure what he meant, but I am honored to be remembered by him and by any of you.
I hope Mark (and you, too) will search you brains for law school and career memories, and if you write them up, we’ll share them in the next report.
Winter 2019-2020
Hardy Wieting’s lovely new book 30 Birds is available on Kindle and in paperback. Hardy gives his account of pursuing
30 different birds in North America. You can learn more and see more at the book’s website, 30birds30.com. He says, “The pursuit, the bird, the place—
these are the essence of birding. That, and the joy.” He also gave a lecture at Yunnan University, Institute of Ecology [China]. The title: Sexual Selection and Beauty: Darwin’s “Second
Theory” and Richard Prum’s book, The Evolution of Beauty. He reports, “I think my lecture on sex went very well — Darwin’s ‘second theory,’ how female choice drives evolution in that
they are looking for beauty in the males they choose to mate with, and the males evolve colors and displays and other sexual ornaments to attract them. It’s not just natural selection
driving things forward. There were almost 100 students there. They seemed to understand what I was saying — no one squirmed, or coughed, or showed any indication they were not
comprehending.”
[see Photo Credits page in book/website to see who took its 30 photos; they include classmate Tom Grey].
Bart Tiernan continues to use this report to harass his friend George Bunn in this spirited offering: “The emergence of overt tribalism in these United States compels me to report that George Bunn has folded his tent like the Arab, and has silently stolen away from the City, to join the migration to Southampton, Long Island, a white settlement on the ancient tribal lands of the Shinnecocks, a sovereign nation seeking to recover those lands in the Courts of the State of New York while preserving its own unique culture by the maintenance of tribal practices involving the conduct of casino operations and the sale of cut-price cigarettes.
“George was ably assisted in his resettlement by my personal assistant (f/k/a my secretary), whose information technology skills have served to connect George to the outside world.
“Nini and I remain embedded in our own ancient tribal lands here on Long Island’s North Shore, long celebrated in song and story by its famed troubadour Cole Porter. At our daughter’s 40th birthday revels (one of our unique tribal customs), George’s daughter Lilly cheerfully observed that she has never seen him happier or more relaxed.
“One wonders whether he will remain so if the Shinnecocks are frustrated by the foreign Courts of the State of New York and invade the back nine of Shinnecock Hills, where it is expected that he will spend his twilight years in furtherance of his own unique culture.‘Further affiant sayeth not.’”
Mike Parish also has a new book. Tower of Babble, “true stories,” he says, based on his experiences in the legal world and inspired by our 50th Reunion. The following is from the book’s preface:
“On the flight back to California after my 50th law school reunion, it came to me that I had been retired for 15 years now. Not having been in legal practice for that extended period, I told myself that if I limited my focus to true stories, there was some chance that people would actually believe me. That’s what this book is. Forty true stories, about my life and also about some other occurrences that I know absolutely to be true and acceptably unusual. I believe there is not nearly enough laughter and humor in our world now, or in the world altogether since the dawn of time, so I want to do my part to change that as much as one man can, which is as close to nothing as there is, but also not nothing at all.” Mike says, “Enjoy every word! I know I have. Best wishes to all.”
Instead of writing books, one of our classmates has jumped into another arts endeavor. Jack Carley reports that he has embarked on a new career. He began in a local community
theater with an appearance in Gore Vidal’s play, The Best Man, based on the 1960 convention involving two contenders. “I played the campaign manager for the former Secretary of
State who was branded an ‘intellectual,’ a mixture of Stevenson and JFK. His opponent is a Joseph McCarthy figure. To illustrate the difference between then and now in politics, the play
turned on the ‘dirt’ turned up on each man. The ‘dirt’ on my guy consisted being accused of mental instability because he had seen a psychiatrist. His opponent is accused of being part of a homosexual ring while in the Pacific during World War II. This season I have a role in Leisure Ladies, a comedy by Ken Ludwig. He wrote, among others, Lend Me a Tenor. Faced with a choice between an uptight minister who is about to marry the local beauty and a garrulous but foolish doctor
who is the head of the local Moose Lodge, I chose the doctor, Awahoo. But I have to memorize all the lines.
“On the domestic front, my wife, Pia, fractured a vertebra at some point this past spring. She had fractured one five years ago as we were going to Stockholm, where she was to emcee an event with the King of Sweden awarding a prize to the Vienna Philharmonic. She was able to go with a brace, and the fracture healed itself. This time, no such luck. We wound up staying in our Manhattan apartment for the entire summer visiting doctors and experiencing the frustrations of the healthcare industry in Manhattan. After MRIs, we found she had two new fractured vertebrae and genetic spine problems, requiring her to spend time in bed. I shall not bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, she has a good deal of pain associated with the recovery, many drugs . . . Getting a consistent diagnosis from doctors is like getting an opinion from lawyers. She has three different back braces she wears, and we discovered a normal office chair that rocks back is the most comfortable place to sit. She really cannot sit for long periods or go to restaurants or the theater. Luckily, she resigned from the American Theater Wing (as a Tony voter who had to see every play opening on Broadway) after three decades before all of this happened.”
Jim Schink is still hard at work at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago. Because he was in the middle of an international arbitration, he had to miss a reunion of the “Ladies Lunch” (the infamous
group that organized the protest against the Vinland Maps at the Beinecke Library during our last year at the law school). Pete Putzel, George Bunn, and I were the only representatives of our class
at this reunion.
DG says: If you are not receiving from me periodic news (and requests for news), please send me your email address. I will be very grateful. Sorry to my classmates whose news I lost in a mishap I would rather not explain. Please give me another chance and send your report again.
Summer 2019
Big news from our class is that we now have a classmate who has been published in The New Yorker. For many years, Mike Parish has been writing short fiction and sharing it with his friends. Some have been published in special journals. Now he has hit the big time with a letter in the Jan. 9 issue this year. Here it is:
“I enjoyed Zoë Heller’s excellent and mercifully brief disquisition on dreams (‘Perchance to Dream,’ Dec. 10). In her list of great revelations provoked or inspired by dreams, however, she omits one of the most profound and far-reaching — the hexagonal structure of the benzene molecule, which the 19th-century chemist August Kekulé claimed to have discovered after a dream or reverie in which he saw a snake biting its own tail. This discovery helped create an entire field of scientific research centered on hydrocarbon manipulation, cementing Kekulé’s status as one of the founders of modern organic chemistry.”
Mike explains that he got so many requests for his writing at our 50th Reunion that he was motivated to write “on the subject of dreams and Kekulé’s dream of
smother and destroy us all.” Mike continues, “I decided that since I have fully retired from law I can now write true stories, and have by now done 20 of them — possibly a door prize for our 55th, but as of now just sent to those classmates who stimulated this activity. I finished the latest one today....It was about playing Clue
on the way from ORD to LAX in the upstairs lounge of a 747 with Alice Cooper and his band, before having an extended nightcap in the hotel lounge with the great Patrick McGoohan — the ‘Secret Agent’ man of the 1960s and Oscar-nominated King Edward I of England in Braveheart. Hope this helps. Copies of the stories, including some legal escapades and close calls, are available to all classmates.”
In March, BC Law Magazine (Boston College Law School), reported: “BC Law Professor Zygmunt Plater was the surprise recipient of an environmental award bestowed on March 1 while he was attending the 37th Annual Public Interest Conference at the University of Oregon. “At the Oregon conference, the Land Air Water Association, in consultation with the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, presented Plater with the Svitlana Kravchenko Environmental Rights Award. Professor Kravchenko, who passed away in 2012, was admired for her academic vigor and spirited activism, qualities that are recognized in the award recipients. Also in keeping with Kravchenko’s spirit, award winners ‘inspire young adults to reach for the stars, while keeping their feet firmly planted in the Earth’ and insist that ‘environmental rights and human rights are indivisible.’ Plater said he was touched by the recognition.
“Plater had organized a conference panel on preparing for the aftermath of the current U.S. administration, bringing in two Canadian scholars who had experience with the issue when Canada’s administration changed in 2015....
“Under the leadership of Prime Minister Steven Harper, a number of key environmental laws were rolled back. Canadian academics and NGOs — anticipating what would be needed when Harper left office — built a comprehensive plan for the next generation of environmental laws. Harper’s 2015 successor, Justin Trudeau, was able to follow their blueprint for ‘Restoring Lost Protections,’ calling for new, modern safe-guards, Plater explained. Plater’s call at the conference was for the U.S. to start thinking immediately about ‘detailed accelerated agendas in advance of the next administration’ in the U.S.
“Plater is a longtime professor at BC Law and the author of The Snail Darter and the Dam — the story of a small endangered fish’s travels through the corridors of American Power — which was prizes went to Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray. David also appeared as a guest on “Responsibilities of Congress in Preserving the Rule of Law,” the fourth of a live-streamed series of programs on the rule of law moderated by Homer Moyer, which can be accessed at ceeliinstitute. org/webinars/. Thanks to Art Hessel, class members living in Washington have the opportunity of enjoying a semi-regular class lunch. And, as many of you know, our class list-the snake biting its tail, which led him to understanding the structure of the benzene ring, the key to the invention of plastics and also to creating complex hydro-carbons that catapulted the gasoline and diesel engines into dominance of our roadways and atmosphere. Three of the first five Nobelists in chemistry were his students, but what was celebrated as a work of genius and a great leap forward for humanity has now become the double-headed Medusa that threatens to
published by Yale University Press and is being made into a documentary film series. He was chairman of the State of Alaska Oil Spill Commission’s Legal Task Force over a two-year period after the wreck of the M/V Exxon-Valdez. Earlier, he was a consultant to plaintiffs in the Woburn toxic litigation, Anderson et al. v. W.R. Grace et al., the subject of the book and movie A Civil Action.
“Kravchenko’s was not the first Land Air Water Association-related award for Plater. In 2005, he received the David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the association at the 23rd International Public Environmental Law Conference.”
“Another facet of Plater’s influence is BC Law’s robust Environmental Law Society, which has launched significant research projects on the Exxon-Valdez and BP Deepwater oil spills, pro bono research for national organizations in Washington, D.C., and support for communities experiencing toxic contamination. Among its recent activities have been Klein’s panel presentation at the Oregon conference; the presentation of a talk by Oliver Sellers-Garcia, director of the Office of Sustainability and Environment in Somerville, MA, on local governments’ struggle against climate change; and a visit from Thomas Jorling ’66, retired vice president of environmental affairs for International Paper.”
The link to this article and to a great photo of Zyg is at: Zyg
Mark Schantz is now Emeritus Professor of Law and General Counsel Emeritus at University of Iowa. Our 50th Reunion reminded him that it was also “the 50th anniversary of my travelling to Montgomery to begin a one-clerk, one-year clerkship with Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. It turns out as well to have been the 100th year of FMJ’s birth. His law clerks had begun to endow an annual lecture at his beloved Alabama Law School. In addition to the lecture in Tuscaloosa there were numerous events in Montgomery, including a marvelous talk by Brian Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative. (He’s a Harvard guy, but all my classmates should contribute.) My connection, and that of my many Yale successors, was greatly upstaged by the fact that the first Johnson Lecture was delivered by one Professor/Judge Guido Calabresi ’58. Guido, as he was known to us, was as sharp and as energetic as ever, delivering a 50-minute lecture on his second look jurisprudence. It wasn’t closely connected to FMJ, but entertainning and edifying to the lawyers in the audience. And, it brought back a flood of memories about how fortunate I felt to have spend a year with Judge Johnson. I’m not sure I had ever properly thanked Professor Black and Dean Pollak for being willing to stretch the truth enough to get me the position.”
Bob McManus and his wife, Nancy, visited Sicily last fall, “and took a day or two to visit her paternal (Lucisano) roots in Reggio Calabria.”
Bob happily reports, “In tax year 2018, I received what is almost surely my last check deriving from the practice of law, following trial, appeal, fraudulent bankruptcy declaration of our defendants and brilliant oral argument by yours truly in D.C. Court of Appeals. It is all over.”
Their daughter, Lily, is a lawyer working for Oracle and likes to adventure, in spite of her parents’ misgivings, such as traveling alone to trek in Nepal last fall while Bob and Nancy were in Sicily.
Peter Bradford writes, “Susan and I spent today on Pitcairn Island.” And then, tongue in cheek, I think, “Some misunderstanding about a mini-reunion, but there are no classmates here.”
Pete Putzel is now Senior Counsel at the Orrick firm in New York, “having accompanied younger colleagues when our small white-collar defense firm merged with Orrick in January 2018.” Pete says, “Anne and I had a superb trip to Zimbabwe-Zambia-Botswana last April and are off to Egypt later this year.”
Winter 2018-2019
Notes specifically about the Reunion appear over in the 50th Reunion column, currently on the Home page .
Richard Ober agrees, “It was a great event — the best part for me was the two hours we spent as a group discussing then and now. I was clearly one of the oblivious ones, focused on skiing and women. Speaking of which, I met my first wife, Peppy Martin, from Connecticut College, my second year there. We got married. I graduated from Yale Law and her from Connecticut College in 1968, but it didn’t work out and she went home to Kentucky three years later [no children — polite divorce]. Imagine my surprise when I received a call from the Louisville Courier Journal in 1999. They asked me what I thought about the Republican nominee for governor of Kentucky. I expressed total ignorance as to who that was, and he said, ‘You used to be married to her.’ I said nothing but nice things, but she lost anyway.”
Rick is now a departmental guest of the Princeton University Neuroscience Department. “As a legal analyst, not an experimental subject!” he emphasizes. The department houses The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, of which he is a team member. The Project supports state- and federal-level reform efforts to eliminate partisan gerrymandering. Rick explains, “We identify opportunities and loopholes in existing law. We can help analyze and craft reform language to help activists translate their ideals into practical solutions. We translate math into law, and law into math. We develop and use mathematical tests that rigorously diagnose unequal opportunity and unfair outcomes in district maps. Our leader and Project founder, Professor Sam Wang, was a co-author with Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken of an amicus brief in the recent Supreme Court case Gill v. Whitford. I recently enjoyed my first co-authorship of what hopefully will be multiple papers and law reviews on the
subject: States.”
Rick co-authored an article on gerrymandering in the Sept. 4, 2018, Washington Post and another recent article in American Prospect.
My great thanks to Jim Mezzanotte for organizing the special pizza tour on Thursday afternoon of the reunion. He took us to his growing up places in West Haven and East Haven, and the food and fellowship were extra treats. I hope we can try it again five years from now.
Because of a big 75th birthday party planned for him on the weekend of our reunion, Zygmunt Plater “was only able to drive down to New Haven early Sunday morning — by which time, dammit, you and a number of other irascibles I’d hoped to hang out with had had to head back home.” He continued, “It was heartwarming to reconnect with the rump bunch of people in our class at Sunday brunch. It’s astonishing how the faces and personalities of a motley crew who had happened to share a rather intense experience long ago — thanks to the ministrations of the wonderful Jack Tate — can remain so vividly familiar after 50 years! And by all the retrospective summaries of how individual class-mates have spent those 50 years, I was reminded of what one of our classmates said near the end of our time at Yale — that ‘we were here at this place to make a life as well as a living and, if we do it right, to make a difference.’ For so many of my classmates, clearly, it’s Mission Accomplished. I continue to love teaching, because you never learn as much about a field as when you try to teach it to these energized young people (who an ongoing ‘Trump-bump’ seems to have made more numerous in applying to law schools, and more energetic). I’m working on groundwork planning for a restorative environmental protection aftermath agenda, for after our current destructive federal leader-ship has been repudiated; also working on indigenous rights in hydro controversies in Latin Amer-ica; also looking forward to filming on the documentary that the brothers who made Wild, Wild Country are making for Netflix on the endangered fish/dam case my students and I took through the Supreme Court.”
Responding to Clifford Pearlman’s report that he did some rock climbing in his 30s, in part to overcome a fear of heights, Zyg wrote, “And just so you know what kind of jock I am, compared to Pearlman, I too had tried rock-climbing! My maiden and sole endeavor was rewarded with 10 days in the Dartmouth hospital.”
Peter d’Errico wrote the following to Joe Bell, who shared with me, “You probably recall I was one of the folks who went to the Navajo legal services operation after graduation: an amazing experience that laid a foundation for pretty much everything I’ve done since — teaching for 30-plus years at UMass/Amherst; litigating various Native issues, primarily land, fishing, hunting cases.
My personal life was enlivened also by meeting traditional people. Most of my academic writing reflects this — collected at
UMass and
Peter. I occasionally write something on a blog:
Blog.
If I can free myself from the cognitive box of legalese, I may be able to pull together a manuscript on what I call ‘federal anti-Indian law’ for a wider audience.”
Gene Moen wrote, “Sorry I was not able to attend the reunion. Had a trial I was preparing for. I am still work-ing at my three-member firm (one lawyer is a daughter), handling only medical malpractice cases on behalf of plaintiffs. Always a fasci-nating, albeit challenging, endeavor. However, I am one of those lucky people who can say I have not had a boring day in the past 40 years. When I get old (I am only 78 now), I will think about retirement.”
Melvin Masuda wrote, “Missed the Pizza Tour and the reunion. I’m the proverbial snug-as-a-bug in my beloved and beautiful Islands-Of-Hawaii…Sincerely and Aloha from your Mid-Pacific Menehune, in the Outlier-Outre Islands-Of-Hawaii, Mel, also known, to his students and Alumni Advisees, as, aka, Uncle Mel and Yoda.”
Chuck Lawrence ’69, also writing from Hawaii, missed the reunion but wrote, “Wish I could be there, but a full teaching load and 6,000 miles will keep me from the celebration. I’m finally retiring in June. Give my best to all, especially Joan, Mathea, Junius, Stan, and Mike Reiss.” From the William S. Richardson School of Law of the University of Hawaii, I learned that he came there in 2008 from Georgetown. He began his teaching career at the University of San Francisco in 1974, was a tenured professor at Stanford and Georgetown, and has visited several other schools, including Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, and the Univer-sity of Southern California. Lawrence is best known for his prolific work in antidiscrimination law, equal protection, and critical race theory. His most recent book, We Won’t Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), was co-authored by Mari Matsuda. Lawrence received the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Most Distinguished Professor Award; the John Bingham Hurlburt Award for Excellence in Teaching, presented by the 1990 graduating class of Stanford Law School; and the Society of American Law Teachers national teaching award. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Haverford College and Georgetown University, and served as a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education and on many other public interest boards.
After 15 years as President of the Atlantic Legal Foundation, Bill Slattery retired in 2015. Atlantic Legal chairman Dan Fisk stated, “Bill has served our Foundation with tire-less dedication, attention to detail, and commendable distinction. He leaves a legacy of which the Foundation is especially proud and a platform from which the Foundation will continue to pursue its mission with vigor, serving the broad public interest.”
I was glad to hear at last from one of my favorite classmates, Monty Sonnenborn even though he wrote to say he could not join the Pizza Tour!
Paul Dykstra is now listed as retired partner at Ropes & Gray in Chicago.
Richard A. Epstein was honored in April by NYU and the University of Chicago for his 50 years in teaching, “first at the University of Southern California, then at the University of Chicago, and finally at NYU.” He received an honorary degree from the University of Sie-gen in Germany for legal scholar-ship, and was also enrolled in the gold book of the town of Siegen. “I continue to publish on a wide range of subjects, and have a weekly column, the Libertarian for the Hoover Institution, as well as four regular podcasts.”
Eric Schnapper writes, “Sorry to have missed the reunion. I have cut back to working full time, teaching at the University of Washington Law School, and handling appeals in employment
discrimination and other civil rights cases. My grandson Theodore, 23 months, has already shown great promise in his LSAT prep, and will be ready for the real thing in a few decades. My
wife and I are starting our third year renovating a 92-year-old house. We are looking forward to our third Women’s March, our respective signs (‘Still nasty after all these years’ and ‘The
few, the proud, the men in the Women’s March’) at the ready.”
* See footnote at bottom of far left column
