Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr.: a curious American.

• Author: Taruffo, Michele
• Position: Testimonial

After I first met Geoff at Yale in the eighties, I had several opportunities to see him at Yale, at Penn, in Pavia, and in many other places in Italy and around the world. Meanwhile, what had started as an academic relationship very quickly became a close friendship. Every time we met, we spent a few minutes in greetings and news and a lot of time discussing justice, judges, procedure, evidence, and so forth. It was during such talks that I discovered Geoff as a "curious American." Actually, Geoff was not--and is not--a true comparativist in the procedural domain: he is "truly American," which probably is a precondition for being, as he is and has been for decades, one of the most prominent scholars of American procedural law. But--and this is the peculiar feature that makes him different from most American lawyers--he is not U.S. centered. In a word, Geoff is curious. He is interested in learning what happens elsewhere, mainly in civil law systems, including Italy, France, and Germany but not excluding China or Japan. He continues collecting information, asking for explanations, and comparing problems and solutions.

While this long and friendly connection continued, two occasions led us to work together for several years. The first opportunity came about when I asked Geoff to write a presentation of the American civil procedure system for foreign readers. At that time, I was a scientific adviser to the Italian publisher Il Mulino, and I was planning a series of books about the most important foreign procedural systems. Geoff accepted immediately but asked me to be his coauthor, and, of course, I agreed. Writing that book was a great experience. We did not split the book into parts but rather worked out the whole text, discussing and revising several drafts. One of my best memories is the final revision of the book we made in Geoff's office at Yale Law School; Geoff was at the computer, I beside him suggesting adjustments, and Geoff's secretary providing us with coffee and cakes. This last speedy and intense revision led us to publish American Civil Procedure: An Introduction with the Yale University Press in 1993. (1) I translated it into Italian and had it published the same year in Italy. The book was a remarkable success: it was reprinted several times in the United States and was also published in Japan, in China, and, a couple of years ago, in Spain. There is a reason for such success outside of the United States: we were writing...