JACK TATE

Memories of our Associate Dean. Starting with remarkable ones from Put Brown, Mel Masuda, and Rich Epstein. Send yours 1968yls@gmail.com

Put Brown: "I love reading the stories about Jack Tate. 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 complemented by my not noticing his strikingly bald head and one arm that he gave me the nod."

Mel Masuda About Dean of Admissions Jack Tate '26 --
"In my senior year at Princeton, I got a travel grant during Christmas vacation to do research in my home State of Hawaii on 'The Statehood Movement and the Politics of Hawaii.' When I got home to Hawaii, I was invited to a Christmas party at which I was introduced to a recent graduate of Yale Law School, Andrew Salz '67, who had been a labor union organizer before he moved his entire family to Yale Law. (In the best of Hawaii traditions, he had a mixed marriage, ethnically, having wed an American Japanese named Nami, and they were blessed with two young kids, a boy and a girl, who quickly became favorites of Andy's Yale Law classmates.)
"At the party, Andy and I got to chatting, and we exchanged anecdotes about his having been, professionally, a labor union organizer of Jewish descent here in Hawaii before being accepted at Yale Law School and about my having been the third Asian-American reporter on the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper. After about 20 minutes, Andy then asked: 'And so where would you like to go to law school?' My reply was: 'Yale, but I don't think I can get in because my LSAT score was low.' Next, to my surprise, Andy said: 'I've liked talking to you -- and here's what I'll do: I'll call the Dean of Admissions, Jack Tate, and I will tell him that I'm sending to him for an interview the one applicant he should accept from Hawaii.' (Ah, the power of geographical distribution!)"
Andy knew, from our prior conversation, that I absolutely abhorred the bitter cold winters back East, and he made me promise that -- very soon after I got back to the barren and frozen Northeast -- I would make a January appointment to interview in person with Dean Tate and take the long (and cold) train trek from Princeton to New York City (one hour) and then from New York to New Haven (another hour and a half). ,br/> I arrived at the Law School, chattering away in the cold, and had a pleasant 45-minute interview with Dean Tate -- at which point he looked at me and said (much as he had handled Richard Epstein's application, as Dick has recalled in the Summer Class Notes): 'Well, let me just say, young man, that Andy Salz is correct -- and that you should be accepted to Yale Law School. Let me tell you, here and now, that you are accepted -- but you can't tell any of your Princeton classmates until the official acceptance letters go out in April.' And that's a promise that I kept to Dean Tate -- Ah: the power of serendipity (and the Good Lord)!!!"

Rich Epstein, in the Summer 2022 Class Notes: “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.”

D.G. Then there is his comment, also from the Summer 2022 notes, that this item "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.

Here are two amusing memories of Jack, not by members of our class, but mighty close:
Meister '70.
Kanter '71

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Classmates: We need memories. Pls send to class gmail address.
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MORE MEMORIES

Lengthy accounts welcome.

Excerpted from: Charles R. Lawrence III, "The Fire this Time: Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Pedagogy and the Law," 65 Journal of Legal Education 381 (Nov, 2015)

"It seems as if I have been “teaching Ferguson” all of my adult life. In the fall of 1964 I applied to Yale Law School, and the admissions office encouraged me to supplement my written application with an interview. As I rode a Greyhound bus to New Haven I read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, a paperback copy purchased for seventy-five cents just before boarding the bus. The five-hour bus trip passed quickly as I read Baldwin's intimate, searing, and prophetic words, written as a letter to his nephew:
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it ... but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
Jack Tate, the dean of admissions at Yale, was a good old boy from Tennessee. I liked him immediately. He seemed genuinely interested in who I was and what I thought. Today I remember none of the questions he asked me except the last: “What is the last book you read for pleasure that was not an assigned reading for one of your classes?” I told him I'd just read Baldwin's new book and that, while I would not describe my experience as “pleasure,” I found the book profoundly moving. Baldwin was speaking directly to me and also speaking for me, saying many things I knew but had not found the words to say. I thought, “... and many things I knew but did not dare to say,” but was not brave enough to say those words.
Dean Tate told me that he had read an excerpt from Baldwin's book in the New Yorker and thought Baldwin's anger was overwrought and unwarranted given America's progress in race relations. He asked me what I thought of Baldwin's assertion that almost all Negroes shared his anger as well as his dark and skeptical view of America's commitment to racial justice. He said that he and his wife had recently discussed the New Yorker piece over dinner with friends who were Negroes and that they too thought Baldwin's writing an exaggerated, if eloquent, account of black alienation and anger, and an unwarranted condemnation of white America.
“Are you an angry Negro like James Baldwin?” The dean did not say these words, but that was the meaning I heard in his question.
I cannot remember my exact response. The dean's Negro friends sitting at his dinner table must have felt as I did now, trapped by this question that asks us to join the lying, in the bargained for/coerced silence that Baldwin had broken. In my head I recited the first stanza of a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem I had learned as a child:
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.
What I said out loud was something vague about recalling that the Negro poet Paul Laurence Dunbar had written a poem about how difficult it was for Negroes to speak with candor to whites about their experiences with racism. I was hoping the dean did not know Dunbar's poem, and I was relieved that he did not press further on the subject.
As I write this essay I find a passage I underlined during my bus ride to that interview fifty years ago. Like Dunbar's poem, it speaks of masks and lies. Baldwin, the angry prophet, adds love:
A vast amount of energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
During my years as a law student at Yale I saw the prophecy of Baldwin's title fulfilled. In 1965, the summer before my first year, Watts erupted in a fiery uprising. The looting and burning went on for six days. The summer after my second year, 1967, saw 159 race riots, with major uprisings in Detroit and Newark. I dropped out of law school for a year to work as an organizer in Philadelphia. In the spring of 1968, just before I returned to Yale for my last year of law school, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and major riots broke out in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, Detroit, and Chicago.
I found law school and the law full of masks, fear, lying, and mirrors, and experienced little of Baldwin's unmasking love. It seemed nearly impossible to learn, much less accept, rules about arms-length bargains, reasonable men, and rationally based laws when my brothers and sisters were burning down their broken neighborhoods. The dissonant juxtaposition of black rage and the law's claims to mutually beneficial rationality and justice upset me and often made me feel that I was going crazy. But my alienation from law school and the law, and the truths of Baldwin's words also led, pushed, dragged, and compelled me to a lifelong struggle to “teach/learn Ferguson.”

More on Ferguson, and
Chuck's complete article here.

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1937, standing, left. General Counsel, Social Security Board.

Oral History A very lengthy, three-part, oral history interview with Jack (audio only) can be found here. (Thank you Cornell).

Jack was class of 1926, and he went to Washington. He worked for various agencies, including the National Recovery Administration, which the Supreme Court ruled to be unconstitutional in 1935, on grounds that it infringed the separation of powers. Jack then went to work for the new Social Security Board, established in 1936 and composed of three appointees, each with a six year term, chosen by the President and approved by the Senate.
He eventually worked in the Legal Advisor's office of the State Department (where twenty years later one of us worked one summer, though that's neither here nor there).
While there in 1952, and serving as Acting Legal Advisor, he signed what has become known as the "Tate Letter," a document stating that State was no longer going to adhere to the doctrine of absolute sovereign immunity. This thus enabled plaintiffs to sue foreign governments, and employees thereof, for actions taken in commercial transactions. (One source adds that in 1976, Congress "placed its imprimatur on the Letter" by enacting the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, establishing procedures for service of process, attachment of property and execution of judgment in proceedings against a foreign state. The phrase "Tate Letter" is still used today.

An article published in the American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 55, No. 4 (December 2015), pp. 465-472, "The Tate Letter: Some Words Regarding Its Authorship," by Robert M. Jarvis of the law school at Florida's Nova Southeastern University dispels the idea that Jack alone was the author of this important letter. And it does so by citing Jack himself.
For Jarvis, the "laboring oar" on the team effort belongs to Conrad E. Snow, a 1917 HLS grad who served in France as an artillery officer during WW1. In 1940, Snow left his NH law practice to go to DC as the director of the legal division of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. He served as a brigadier general, moving to the Legal Adviser's Office at State ater the war. There he chaired the Committee on Sovereign Immunity, which prepared a 176-page report on the subject.
At this point Jarvis turns the article over to Tate himself. This is, however, preceded by the remark that "Curiously, Tate never published anything about his famous namesake, although he continued to monitor its progress" and a footnote in which he says in 1960 Tate asked Eliezer Ereli, a third-year law student at Yale, to examine how the letter was faring in the courts. Ereli reported, "The last eight years produced only [a] few cases concerning sovereign immunity". Tate then wrote to Leonard C. Meeker at State, who replied, "I am glad to be able to report that the doctrine of the Tate letter is still in business."
Jarvis then resurrects from the Truman papers a speech Tate gave to the NYC Bar Association in 1954, using the handwritten notes that Jack made at the time. Typical is the remark that "In any event, there is a long history behind the change in policy and the work of many minds went into it."
"The classical theory, that under International Law, a state could not without its consent be a respondent, of course had not gone without question.
In the Brussels Convention of 1926 the parties (of which the US. was not one) agreed that merchant vessels owned or operated by foreign governments should be subject to the same obligations as privately owned merchant vessels." -- a view which Secretary of State Lansing had in 1918 favored. Justice Department, however, disagreed.
"A group of lawyers was given the task of studying all the available decisions. . . .
After the end of World War I the courts of many countries abandoned the classical theory and adopted the restricted theory, no doubt due to the entry into trade by so many states during and since that war.
It seemed to those of us who worked on the problem that, with many states denying the existence of immunity where the foreign government engages in commerce, it would be difficult, even if desirable, to maintain the classical theory as part of the customary I.L.
In addition, the Department of State was of the opinion that the increasing practice of governments to engage in commercial activities made it desirable that individuals who did business with them should have their rights determined in the courts.
Accordingly, after meticulous intra- and inter-departmental clearances, the letter of May 1952 announcing the changed policy was published.
You will recall that the letter points out that it is realized that a shift in policy by the executive cannot control the courts but that it is felt that courts are less likely to allow a plea of sovereign immunity where the executive has declined to do so.
The reference there is, of course, to the case of the Republic of Mexico v. Hoffman decided by the Supreme Court in 1945. The opinion, written by Chief Justice Stone, said, 'it is not for the courts to deny an immunity which our government has seen fit to allow, or to allow an immunity on new grounds which the government has not seen fit to recognize.'
In a concurring opinion, Justice Black joined Justice Frankfurter in saying, 'If this be implied recession from the decision in Berizzi Bros. Co. v. The Pesaro, I heartily welcome it.'
It appears therefore that whether the Court holds that immunity is controlled by International Law or by foreign policy considerations, there is now support in policy and in law justifying a holding that the result should be in accordance with the restrictive theory, according to which trading states could no longer assert immunity to suits in our courts growing out of commercial activities."