Joseph Goldstein: my teacher.

• Author: Calabresi, Guido
• Position: Yale Law School professor

About forty-five years ago, in my second year as a student at the Yale Law School, an extraordinary group of new faculty members arrived. They included Alexander Bickel, Charles Black, Abe Goldstein, Leon Lipson, Ellen Peters, Harry Wellington, and Joe Goldstein. Together with those who had preceded them by a year, like Louis Pollak and Quintin Johnstone, there were fourteen or so new arrivals. I believed then, and continue to think now, that no law school has ever had so remarkable an influx and so magnificent a burst of creative energy. The new kids--for most were very young--were brilliant, testy, different from each other and from the preexisting Yale Law School faculty. And yet they fit right in, with a school that already had more than its share of academic superstars, and with that special atmosphere that defined the Yale Law School then, as it does today.

Even in that amazing group, Joe Goldstein stood out from the first. Others will speak of his scholarship, of the depth of his knowledge, originality, and teaching capacity in his chosen fields--from which--like so many others--I have greatly benefited. But in this short Tribute, I want, instead, to recall Joe as my teacher in a field he knew virtually nothing about, had--I believe--never taught before, and would certainly never teach again: the law of bankruptcy.

In those golden days, the universally recognized god of bankruptcy was a short, round, Montana-born-and-bred, former amateur boxer named J.W. Moore. He owned the great bankruptcy treatise, Collier on Bankruptcy,(1) as he did the multivolume text in the other field he dominated, Moore's Federal Practice.(2) And he was also universally considered to be a superb classroom teacher. As a result, most of each Yale Law School class--some 165 students--would flock into his bankruptcy course, called Debtors' Estates (in contrast with Harvard's equivalent, which was named Creditors' Rights).

The Dean, Eugene Rostow, thought that a class that size was too large for Yale. So he "asked," and Joe (probably because he was so new), uncharacteristically, agreed to teach another section of bankruptcy in the same term as J.W. That most students would still want to sit at the feet of the old master didn't matter, "Gene the Dean" thought. An alternative would be available, and those who wanted a Yale-sized class could have one.

So it came about. One hundred and fifty students signed up for Moore's Debtors' Estates. Fifteen or so of us elected...