For my friend.

• Author: Bobbitt, Philip Chase
• Position: Columbia Law School law professor Charles Black

Auden wrote somewhere that a friend is simply someone of whom, in his absence, one thinks with pleasure. How do we measure that against Dante's famous observation that there is no greater pain than to remember happy days in days of sorrow? (1) They are both right, are they not? I cannot think of my first memory of Charles without smiling even though all afternoon my throat has ached with the strain of suppressed anguish at the loss of him. "Memory is all that the death of such a man leaves us." (2)

I met Charles early in my second year in law school. I was in Boris Bittker's office and he asked, "Where are you from?" "Austin, Texas." "Have you met Charles Black?" Of course Charles had many friends who were friends of my parents, and they had asked me to look him up, which, in the manner of young people, I had no intention of doing. Bittker insisted. I demurred, and so he forcibly took me by the shoulders and dragged me down the hall, frogmarched me into Charles's office, and, over my continuing objections, introduced me. It may be that this was just Bittker's desperate ploy to get me out of his office, but I choose to think it was an altogether characteristic act of that generous man; Bittker sat me down and my friendship with Charles began almost at once. Of that meeting Charles later wrote me, "You showed me it is never too late to make an old friend."

Charles grew up in Austin in a house that is only a few blocks from my own. The television and radio and who knows what else have largely effaced from my voice the unusual sounds of that city where the melodic sine curves of the low-lying Southern coastal fields meet the sharper, more angular tones of the hill country. Yet I can hear Charles's voice so clearly in my head--not as dry as Lyndon Johnson's, not as sweet as William Styron's or Robert Penn Warren' s, but something blended like the Colorado that demarcates the change from East to West where our city is placed.

He and I liked to make fun of the Yankees among whom we found ourselves and their complacent assumptions of a certain superiority. One notable incident occurred when the distinguished director Robert Brustein cast Charles as Cicero in a production of Julius Caesar at the Yale Rep. Charles had a Roman face and manner and Cicero was a rhetorician of the kind that is only found in law schools today. But Brustein objected to Charles's accent, saying that such an accent was inappropriate to the role, implying perhaps that it was a little uncouth for an aristocratic Roman. Charles, whose family could aptly be called patrician, said he asked him, "Bob, why do you think a first century Roman would speak with a New York accent?"

Charles was an academic of rare distinction and yet he had also acquired a tragic quality of isolation. There was a nobility in this isolation from the various schools and intellectual movements that came and went during his day.

This nobility shone forth on the many occasions when he was out of step with the received opinions of right-thinking people, tending to disqualify him in the eyes of the sort of persons who make up committees and colloquia. I could give many examples--his commitment to civil rights at a time when few Southerners could see clearly the monstrosity of segregation in their midst,3 and few Northerners wanted to get involved, (4) his support for the Nixon White House's position on executive privilege (5) (we later used to say that in the Nixon proceedings the Congress had lynched a guilty man), his argument that the Fourteenth Amendment should be construed to assure a minimal level of economic security and decency in living conditions, (6) a view most people today would find only a little more out of step than his crusade against capital punishment, (7) nor should I omit the fact that he verged on calling me a war criminal when I worked for the government during the period of the Gulf War, or the courage it took to write a monograph reacting to the suppression of the Intifada entitled Let Us Rethink Our "Special Relationship" with Israel. (8)

Charles's opinions were called abrasive and idiosyncratic, two things you don't want to be called if you hold reputation dear. He was not a leader but rather a prophet with a voice as visionary as a Skald's in an Icelandic saga. He was in no sense a public intellectual, and he never wanted to found...