The crowning of hearts: a tribute to Dean Huffman.

AuthorLansing, Ronald B.
PositionTestimonial

Dean James L. Huffman, the tenth law dean in the 124 year history of this law school, is the most agreeable person with whom I have ever had the joy to disagree. I puzzle over that seeming oxymoron--disagreeing with the agreeable---every bit as enigmatic as its antithesis, agreeing with the disagreeable.

After all, what makes us what we are? Certainly not our clothes, our talent with violins, colors, words, or baseballs. What we truly are has little to do with muscle, weight, height, health, or any other physicality that attracts consumers to commerce and producers to advertising. Nor can it or should it be ancestry, nationality, customs, caste, or body colors.

What we are has to be something at heart and mind. So, if the essence, spirit, ethos, soul of a person is feeling and thought, how can we disagree with the agreeable? Can we dissent from concepts yet embrace their conceiver? Are we true when we reject the message yet receive the courier? Is simultaneous protest and acceptance hypocrisy?

Case in point: Dean Jim, an agreeable man with whom I disagree. The affinity must be something deeper than the difference--something more of the person. Jim and I argue generally in the arena of economic analysis of law and his free market approach to it--like as though what makes the law clock tick are willing buyers and sellers and costs and benefits, all turned into dollars, numbers, and other wealth quantifications of the qualities of life, liberty, and happiness. Specifically, we part over environmental protection and the extent to which government regulators should intrude on private property and its use. Jim's Jeffersonian and Libertarian views follow the admonition that governing is best when least. His arguments in support of his notions have been so over-whelming that the best rebuttal I could muster was to call them "naive"--a non-constructive epithet for which I take this forum to apologize.

Ah but, this assignment is not about argument; it's about acknowledgment. The task here is tribute. In spite of contrariety, Jim is nonetheless a most likeable colleague and for thirteen years has been a stalwart leader as our dean. And thus, the conundrum: How can there be "agreeable" midst disagreement? The hint of an answer may lie in the following true story--a reminiscence upon an outdoor journey lived some two decades ago.

Somewhere in the mid-1980s, Professors Mike Blumm and Jim Huffman, students Jeff Bennett and Steve Owlett, Jim's sister...

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