My friend Abe Goldstein.

• Author: Krash, Abe
• Position: Yale Law School faculty member - Testimonial

Abe Goldstein and I were friends for more than half a century. I first met him in Washington in 1950, and during the years that followed our lives and careers intersected at a number of points. I came to have great regard for him.

I should preface the account of our initial meeting with some brief background. In May 1950, shortly before I left Yale, where I was a Graduate Fellow, to seek a job in Washington, Professor Boris Bittker suggested that I contact Raoul Berger, a solo practitioner in Washington. When I called on Berger, he told me that an associate in his office, Abe Goldstein, had departed some months earlier to become the law clerk to Judge David L. Bazelon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Bazelon had recently been appointed to the bench, and he had appealed to Berger for assistance in finding a law clerk. Berger had volunteered, with great reluctance, to allow Abe to accept the clerkship. Accordingly, there was an opening in Berger's office, and the next day he phoned to offer me the job that Abe had vacated. Thus, I became a successor to Abe in my first job as a lawyer. I could not possibly have replaced him.

As I recall, I was introduced to Abe by Berger several months later. Berger was an able man, and he was also an exacting taskmaster. Years later, Abe and I would recall, amidst much laughter, our common experience in "Berger's boot camp."

Following his clerkship, Abe joined Donohue & Kaufman, a small Washington law firm where he remained until 1956. The senior partner--"Jiggs" Donohue--was a well known figure in Washington; he had been one of three commissioners who ran the government of the District of Columbia. Donohue was the "rainmaker," and Abe was the legal craftsman. The firm enjoyed a substantial civil and criminal practice. Abe had the opportunity to function in a first chair capacity in a number of complex litigation matters and to experience the rough and tumble of a courtroom. He liked private practice, and he had considerable doubt about his decision to leave Washington in 1956 to accept Dean Eugene Rostow's offer to join the Yale faculty. In any event, his experience in practice greatly influenced his views as a teacher and scholar.

In the many conversations we had during the early 1950s--usually at lunch or at dinner--I was impressed by his tough-minded, common sense approach to legal matters. Abe possessed in abundance the virtue prized most highly by first-rate lawyers: excellent judgment.

In 1953, I became involved in a case that later became a centerpiece in Abe's first book, The Insanity Defense. (1) After Berger closed his office in late 1952, (2) I became an associate at Arnold, Fortas & Porter. In the summer of 1953, Abe Fortas was appointed by the D.C. Court of...