Connecting to what matters: remembering Bo Burt.

• Author: Minow, Martha
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Testimonial

Bo Burt was gentle and passionate; supportive and forceful; larger than life and committed to improving death and dying. I am honored to be here, and to join Linda, Anne and Jessica, and all the families of Bo as we pay tribute to him and mourn together.

I was not officially his student in law school. Instead, I was his student for life. As a reader of his work, as a member of the extended family of law clerks of Judge David Bazelon, as a fellow board member for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health, and as a friend, I learned from him. His students, colleagues, family, and friends are not the only ones diminished by his passing. All who learn from paradox should feel his loss. The same is true for all who think we human beings are at our best when grappling with the hardest problems. I always think of him with his sleeves rolled up--literally and figuratively--ready to wrestle, gently yet persistently, with directly engaging tough questions.

Bo asked: what is the dark side of benevolence? This was on his mind when we first met; he was writing what became the book, Taking Care of Strangers. (1) I read the manuscript and discovered a searching and often agonized voice. He did not spare the reader details about physical and emotional pain. I had never encountered legal scholarship like this. The text is passionate, vivid, and indifferent to the lines so often separating law, psychology, ethics, and meaning. In that book, Bo looked hard at what happens between doctors and patients. He found too often hypocrisy and abuse.

He concluded, "[B]oth physicians and patients equally need protection to assure that the benevolent intentions each brings to their mutual encounter with illness and death are not transformed, however unintentionally, into their destructive counterparts." (2) With his distinctive psychoanalytic lens, Bo interpreted Stanley Milgram's studies to exemplify his own conclusion: by treating relations between people as if they were objects of science, people can "lose common empathetic identifications with one another and engage in brutally hurtful conduct." (3)

Some years later, he asked: why do great judicial efforts to pursue justice fail? Why did Brown v. Board of Education fail to end racial hierarchy in law and practice? Bo located at least part of the problem in the Court's replication of the very relationship of domination and subordination it meant to undo. He explained, the Court squandered opportunities "for promoting relations based on mutual respect for equality among social adversaries." (4) Progress could come only when the Court stops this pattern and opens "the previously coerced conclusion of this warfare embodied in...