Citizen Brown.

AuthorKronman, Anthony T.
PositionRalph Sharp Brown, Intellectual Property, and the Public Interest - Brief Article

Good afternoon. On behalf of my colleagues at the Law School, the Yale University Press, and the members of the Brown family, I would like to welcome you to this service of remembrance and celebration.

We are here this afternoon to remember the life of our good friend, Ralph Brown. Ralph's was a life of many parts. Others in their remarks will have something to say about Ralph's extraordinary involvement with the American Association of University Professors, with the American Civil Liberties Union, with the Yale University Press, and, of course, with his beloved town of Guilford. I am going to speak about Ralph's involvement: in the life of the Yale Law School, a school on whose faculty he served for more than fifty years, and that he loved with every fiber of his being. But what I have to say about Ralph in my remarks this afternoon will reveal an aspect of the man that all of his other involvements at Yale and beyond the University reveal as well. Ralph was a man of integrity, and that means that he had the wholeness of character and soul that shows itself completely in every undertaking and engagement of the person. It is the most precious of all qualities, and Ralph possessed it in visible abundance.

I want to make three different sets of observations about Ralph's life in the Law School. I want first to say a word or two about his career as a teacher. Then I would like to speak briefly about Ralph's role as a citizen in the life of the School. Finally, and to my mind most importantly, I want to say a few words about Ralph's guiding beliefs and the way in which they reflected the ideals of the law school that he loved so deeply.

On Ralph as a teacher, I have to begin by noting the obvious: Ralph was a great scholar. He was the author of many distinguished, indeed celebrated, books and articles. He was, in fact, the master of his chosen field--the law of intellectual property--and that is not something that can be said about every distinguished scholar in this University. He occupied his field. He shaped it. He gave it life for an entire generation of scholars, though I suspect that many of his students never really appreciated the extent of Ralph's stature as a scholar until they encountered, perhaps years later, his written work in a more extensive way.

Nor, I suspect, did it matter much to them. What mattered was Ralph's warmth and openness, his genuine availability as a human being, and his willingness to open his office and his...

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