Dean of law and life.

• Author: Wheeler, Stanton
• Position: Abe Goldstein, Yale Law School faculty member - Testimonial

Abe Goldstein was a boundary crosser. During his half-century on the faculty, he enriched the life of Yale Law School in many ways. He crossed the boundaries between law and other disciplines, between law school and law practice, and more generally between law and life.

From the moment Abe arrived as a new law teacher--the year was 1956--he was immersed in interdisciplinary activities. Abe was brought back to teach because he had a superb record as a student, as a law clerk to Judge David L. Bazelon on the D.C. Circuit, and as a fine lawyer. (He could also teach evidence, an immediate need.) But Dean Rostow and others also thought him a natural to serve as the coordinator of a new program made possible by a National Institute of Mental Health grant for work in law and the behavioral sciences.

That grant called for the appointment of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists, who would participate in seminars that were in a law school divisional program called Law and Behavioral Science. Among other things, it brought Yale sociologists Richard (Red) Schwartz and Jerome Skolnick to the school in what I believe was the first program of its kind. The program eventually ran its course. Sociologists Schwartz and Skolnick moved on and became major figures in the law-and-society movement, but they got their start here.

Several years later, during Dean Pollak's administration, Abe was actively involved in obtaining major support from the Russell Sage Foundation for law and social science training. Each year a melange of young political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and occasionally anthropologists, were exposed to the law school and to each other. Throughout the early and mid-seventies, that program, coupled with the Law and Modernization program, made Yale Law School a prime incubator for those who would become leading contributors to sociolegal scholarship.

Abe loved law, and he also loved the craft of lawyering. As he entered his deanship, he was one of the law school's strong proponents of clinical legal education, where students could learn the lawyer's craft working with indigent clients under the supervision of law school attorneys. This was part of a broader concern for the relevance of law training after societal upheavals growing out of the Vietnam War and the civil rights disorders of the late sixties. As he expressed it in a speech at the annual dinner of The Yale Law Journal, and later to alumni in a 1970 Yale Law...