Bo Burt: in the whirlwind of his own making.

• Author: Price, Monroe E.
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Testimonial

Bo Burt was multiple conversations in process, so daring in ideas, so important to so many, so generative of ways of thinking. My vantage point is as a classmate and a friend, fortunate to have interacted with Bo as part of a rich and interesting cohort of (almost entirely) young men augmented by marriages and families. Already ambitious and with dreams of future accomplishment, our class, brought together through chance and skill, would together be reshaped and repositioned through the intense funnel of the Yale Law School. We could not then foresee how our friendships intersecting with major events would affect the arcs of our careers. (1)

Now we have hindsight, for all it is worth. Even the fiftieth reunion of our law school class, the Class of 1964, is receding into memory. Increasingly, the stories of our classmates have not only beginnings, but ends. We can see how members, Bo included, negotiated political and cultural changes (Bo starting, after law school, with that most engaged of all federal judges, Chief Judge David Bazelon, and staying true to Bazelon-like principles of involvement). Still, we fight to adjust to the abrupt caesura of a man with such staggering vitality and range of ideas, mindful of how much he brought to meaningful realization in his books, articles, lectures, and those many conversations where he would happily guide those of us lucky enough to be his friends.

Given these many contributions, I focus on what those early Yale and post-Yale years might have meant to Bo, and what course they helped to set. Doing so might help us see again the magic in the fact that we were at that Yale Law School, interacting with those faculty and that extraordinary combination of fellow law students. It might refresh our sense of racing up and down those New Haven staircases, from Coke Lounge to the library, working through the night in a decidedly predigital age, always in a cauldron of strong personalities, clanging ideas, and wrestling intellects. We get a glimpse of what it meant that we lunched together and launched together. How did our interactions at 127 Wall Street help forge a path? How did that path turn or pivot with our initial ventures after graduation, like Bo's with Chief Judge Bazelon and, just afterwards, Senator Joseph Tydings? How did we function as a group, classmates checking in with each other, collaborating, becoming family friends, often being mutually supportive? Surely, those precious years together engendered ideas and vectors traceable in the lives that unfolded.

A convenient starting place, oddly, is Bo's very last public presentation, preternaturally elegiac, which he gave two weeks before his death. The title was resonant with valedictory, bringing him and us back to our formative student days. The site of his talk was the Sigmund Freud University, the audience scholars of law and mental health, and the subject The Yale School of Law and Psychoanalysis, from 1963 Onward. I like the title especially because he describes an epoch defined as starting when we were students. And I like it because it makes the task of eulogizing easier: Bo was given to elegant, subtle, and satisfying self-eulogy.

"Here we were," he wrote in his Vienna talk, "in an intimate seminar room with Anna Freud, the founder of the discipline of child psychoanalysis and the daughter of Sigmund Freud, the founder of the entire enterprise of psychoanalysis." He recounted, somewhat breathlessly, that "[t]his was the beginning for me of a long fascination and engagement with psychoanalytic thought. It was an exhilarating beginning." Of course, Bo's suggestion that we were part of an about-to-be significant moment, if not an already historic one, is nicely typical of how we were...