In memory of Gene Rostow.

• Author: Kronman, Anthony T.
• Position: Testimonial

In the vault of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where many notables are buried, there is a simple memorial to Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who designed the Cathedral. "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice," the tablet reads. "If you seek a monument, look about." And so one might say, with equal truth, as we gather in the Yale Law School to recall and celebrate the life of Eugene Rostow: "If you seek a monument, look about." For this is the school that Gene built, and though it is the work of many hands, of no one can it be said, as fully and truly as it can of Gene, that he gave the place the shape it has, and defined its special spirit.

When Gene arrived at the Law School in the fall of 1934, the building was barely three years old, and was occupied by a brilliant and iconoclastic faculty known collectively as the legal realists. At war with the established conventions of legal scholarship, with the University administration--which viewed them with alarm--and even, I suspect, with themselves, the legal realists gave to the study of law an excitement, a range, a freshness of purpose and possibilities it had never had before and has never lost since. In the years that followed, the spirit of legal realism, once so horrifying to the academic establishment, became the spirit of the establishment itself. Today its radical ambitions have become conventional truths, and the restless and unconventional law school that Gene Rostow came to in 1934 has become the leading law school in the world, without ever losing touch with the enthusiasm, the irreverence, the inventiveness and curiosity that made this school the wild place it was when Gene arrived, and makes it wild still.

This is the miracle of the modern Yale Law School--that it has kept its wild heart and won the world's respect--and the magician who performed the miracle is the man we remember today. "If you seek a monument, look about." Count up the features of the place we take for granted, the elements of its life and culture that are as solid as the stones of the building itself, and vastly more important. They are all Gene's handiwork, the product of his imagination and persistence. If this building fell down tomorrow, would the Yale Law School survive? Yes, of course it would, though perhaps not under such comfortable conditions. (1) Even if its faculty and students had to meet in tents on the New Haven Green, the Yale Law School would be the place it is. But would it survive the abolition of the small group program for first-term students--one of Gene's inventions or of the graduate program for foreign students, to which he gave new energy and purpose? Would it survive the dissolution of its ties to all the other schools and departments of the University, ties that Gene either strengthened or built from scratch? Would the Yale Law School survive could it survive--if...