Inspiring generations.

• Author: King, Nancy J.
• Position: Testimonial

It is difficult to imagine Michigan Law School without Yale Kamisar. He seems as much a part of the place as the Reading Room, the heavy oak doors, and the sounds of the marching band practicing, the steam heaters knocking, and the footsteps on the stone floors. That Michigan students will no longer experience his inspiration and guidance in person is sad, but inevitable. Fortunately, law students everywhere, and the law that they have learned to love, will never escape his influence.

The editors of this issue have encouraged us to relate our own experiences with Yale. Mine started long ago. I first encountered Professor Kamisar in 1966, tagging along with my mother to law school when I was just seven years old. "Kamisar" was one of her professors, in his first year teaching at Michigan after leaving the other U of M--Minnesota. Yale has told me that I sat next to my mother in class, looking on in a very early edition of the casebook that I was later to coauthor. I have absolutely no memory of this experience myself (at most I may have ducked my head inside a classroom once or twice). I remember, though, that my mother told me at the time that Kamisar was "a great man." Years later, as I first sat down in his class as a law student myself, I had high expectations. But nothing prepared me for how much I would end up learning from him.

In a Kamisar classroom, discussion of a decision by the Supreme Court was a highly animated version of "What's wrong with this picture?" We students discovered where a Justice's logic fell apart, what questions went unanswered, which real-world conditions were ignored. We learned how to clear aside fuzzy expression and articulate the principles beneath. It wasn't long before the analytic skepticism we developed in Kamisar's class became part of the standard equipment that we applied to everything we read in law school. Now and then, we used these tools to test Kamisar himself, doggedly picking apart the arguments that he made to us in class. At those golden moments when we watched one of our classmates holding his own against the master, bringing him up short, Yale would pause, smile, and say, "Good point, damn it ... OK, OK...." For with his heart-felt convictions, he placed a high value on excellence--excellence in reasoning, in research, and in writing. Sheer smarts and good work counted with Kamisar, never political correctness.

He reserved his considerable temper for the lazy, the disrespectful, the arrogant or indifferent student who dared to admit he hadn't read for class, didn't listen, or worst of all, didn't care. There were few of these, as I recall. It...