Charles Black: gentle genius.

• Author: Calabresi, Guido
• Position: Columbia Law School law professor

Charles Black came to the Yale Law School faculty in 1956 as part of the most extraordinary group of scholars to burst on one school in the history of American law teaching. Fourteen came, essentially together: Alex Bickel, Joe Bishop, Ward Bowman, Frank Coker, Abe Goldstein, Joe Goldstein, Quint Johnstone, Leon Lipson, Bay Manning, Ellen Peters, Lou Pollak, Clyde Summers, Harry Wellington ... and Charles Black. Of these, Charles was the recognized superstar. It was not just what he had already done, but also the firm intuition that the past was but a glimmer of what was to come that led Gene Rostow--like any great dean as capable of remembering the future as he was of inventing the past--to hail Charles's coming as the crowning event of his new deanship and to name Charles to a specially created university chair, the Luce Professorship. Rostow could do this with confidence for he had understood what we would all soon learn, that Charles was that rarest of creatures--virtually unknown among legal academics--a true genius.

I have known very few geniuses in my life. The word is often used fatuously to describe people of unusual intelligence. But a genuine genius is a quite different animal, almost a separate species. Moreover, a real genius is almost always insufferable. In my life, I have known only one truly gentle, lovable genius, and that was Charles Black.

Genius is not just a matter of the speed with which one works, though Charles certainly was blindingly fast. The impeachment book--it is said--was written in a weekend. And Grant Gilmore told the story that when he and Charles had signed up to do their monumental admiralty treatise, both characteristically delayed getting started. The editor began bugging Gilmore and, to calm him, Grant, who knew that Charles had yet to write a word of the first half of the work, told the editor that he (Gilmore) would have his part done a month after Charles had finished his. Not unaware of his own abilities, Gilmore thought that a month's handicap on Charles would more or less suffice. If he began when Charles did, he would be O.K. But Charles went on "vacation" for two weeks and returned with his half--of what was then and has ever since been viewed as the model for treatises--fully done, leaving Gilmore to bark furiously as he sought to keep the editor at bay.

Genius is not only the capacity always to see things in a different and unexpected light, a lamp that once lit inexorably determines the way...