Barbara S. Green: Courage and Compassion in Law and Life

• Publication year: 2000
• Citation: Vol. 35

35 Creighton L. Rev. 7. BARBARA S. GREEN: COURAGE AND COMPASSION IN LAW AND LIFE

Creighton Law Review

Vol. 35

CATHERINE M. BROOKS(fn*)

For the many years that Barbara S. Green has served as a professor of law at Creighton University, she has been a model of passionate teaching - and learning - for her students, colleagues, and friends. In these last few years, leading up to her medical disability retirement, Barbara has come to accept the failing sight, episodes of blindness, and difficult medical treatments that ultimately required her to leave the classroom. But that acceptance was not easily achieved.

Barbara Green has fought the progress of her disease with the same energy she brought to her law students, whom she taught with vigor, accuracy, and an acute sense of the personal - whether applied to the individuals in her classroom or to the persons her students would come to serve in the law profession. Barbara worked hard to help her students achieve their own goals - giving women and men encouragement and direction as they planned their law careers; guiding students who were establishing and continuing the VITA law school project (which provides free assistance to persons who need help in completing and filing tax forms); and coordinating the ceremony the law school can claim as its own: the ritual of law faculty hooding at graduation. How well deserved were the applause and cheers she received each year from the organized lines she had formed of distracted, relieved, happy graduates who wanted their families to see them at their best. Caring for the student's whole person is a Creighton principle that Barbara embraces and epitomizes. Dedication to another's well-being comes as naturally to her as breathing.

Barbara's dedication to holding her disease at bay while she struggled to keep on teaching - without reliable sight - is evident in the hours she spent learning to use touch and voice control of the technologies that had become integral parts of her own continuing education and the education of her students. A natural student of languages (including the seemingly indecipherable language of the tax code), she approached ASL and Braille with enthusiasm, only to find herself facing the unyielding side effects of the medicines needed to treat her eye disease. What she could control as a teacher...