Joseph Goldstein, a Remembrance.

• Author: Gitter, Max
• Position: Yale Law School professor

I'm a former student of Joe Goldstein.

Joe Goldstein was my teacher when I was a second- and third-year law student in 1967 and 1968. Joe Goldstein was my teacher in 1969. Joe was my teacher in 1970 and 1971. He was my teacher throughout the 1970s. He was my teacher throughout the 1980s. And he was my teacher throughout the 1990s.

When I was in law school, Joe was my teacher primarily in the classroom. And what a gifted classroom teacher he was! Actually, I shouldn't say classroom, but seminar room. I had two or three seminars with him. One of them--he taught it with Al Solnit, Anna Freud, and Jay Katz--was the most memorable experience in my twenty years of going to school. Joe was the master of the seminar. And I hope a seminar room will be named after him.

Joe taught by the Socratic method. Not the Socratic method of the notorious professor in The Paper Chase who humiliated students in class. But what I imagine was the Socratic method of Socrates himself. Constantly asking questions--asking questions not only of his students but of himself. All designed to draw out students--and he drew me out, although I had never spoken in class before. (That's not literally true: In Ralph Winter's Torts class I sat in the back next to my roommate and we talked to one another the entire semester.)

Joe loved his students; many became his friends. I was fortunate enough to be one of them (and for over thirty-two years). He loved to teach, and it showed.

And what he taught us in those seminar rooms was not so much the stated subjects of his seminars: criminal law, family law, psychoanalysis and the law, and later constitutional law. Rather, he taught how to think about those subjects, about law, and about problems generally. And he also taught how to teach.

Toward the end of my third year, I began to work with Joe on a couple of articles. And in that work we did together, he taught me how to write. He taught me how to write in the same way he taught everything else--not by lecturing or hectoring, but by asking questions:

"Do you think we should begin with this idea?"

"Do you think we should move this paragraph over here?"

"Do you think we should use this word rather than that?"

After I graduated from the Law School, he taught me--rather, I should say, he tried to teach me--by a different method: by his example. And as I prepared for this occasion and thought about what Joe taught me by example, so many things came to mind that I knew I would not have time...