Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr.: scholar, law reformer, teacher, and mentor.

• Author: Struve, Catherine T.
• Position: Testimonial

I am very honored to be invited to place my remarks among those published here. I do not approach in eminence the authors of the other tributes. But, if the question be who among us has learned the most from Geoff Hazard, I am prepared to stake my claim. As I will explain, Geoff has profoundly shaped my understanding of procedure.

When, almost a decade ago, I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania Law School to start my teaching career, I hoped to study the intersection of civil procedure and professional responsibility, and I knew of Geoff's larger-than-life stature in both of those fields. My knowledge, however, was relatively abstract. I did not yet know Geoff himself.

My first task as a new teacher of civil procedure was to choose a casebook. Faced with a vast array, I chose Geoff's. (1) The choice was easy. Other books offered me a teacher's manual; with this casebook I had access to the senior author. Of course, I have no doubt that Geoff would have been equally generous with his time had I been teaching from another casebook; but it was a particular delight to talk with him about directions in which to nudge my class's discussion of his own book.

Though I had, of course, taken civil procedure and I had practiced law, it was by teaching the course that I really began to learn the subject. And in that endeavor my primary instructor was Geoff--not just in person (that semester I came to love meeting him and our fellow procedure teachers for coffee in the lounge after our morning classes) but through the casebook. (2) Its lucid and well-structured exposition broadened and deepened my understanding; its questions about litigants' motivations (why did the Robinsons care so much about keeping Seaway and World-Wide Volkswagen as defendants?) (3) encouraged me to press students to think about the realities of lawyering; and its focus on state as well as federal procedure brought home to me the web of connections between the two. (4)

My next task as a new law teacher was to write. Here, too, Geoff was always willing to provide his time and counsel. I soon perceived his genius for listening to a description of a nascent research project and cutting to its core, providing new insights for the project's structure and development. He did this with so many of my projects that to list them here would be tedious. (5)

I have seen Geoff give the same attention to others' work as well, and not only to that of colleagues. For the last four years I have had the pleasure of coteaching a seminar, Advanced Problems in Federal Procedure, with Geoff and Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica. (6) They had previously been coteaching the course, but because Geoff was due to be away from the University...