Judge Wisdom, the great teacher and careful writer.

AuthorBlack, Allen D.

Without a doubt, history will remember Judge Wisdom primarily for his strength and courage in leading the Fifth Circuit and the lower federal courts to end racial segregation in the South. That is as it should be. Judge Wisdom's work in civil rights cases conferred upon millions of Americans the full stature of equal citizenship, and made him a giant of the law and a hero of the nation.

I write, however, to praise some other outstanding characteristics of this kind and gentle man, in particular his genius as a teacher and his devotion to careful writing.

Judge Wisdom excelled at everything he did. As a practicing lawyer he tried and won important cases in both Louisiana and federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States.(1) He was instrumental in bringing the common-law concept of trusts into the civil law of Louisiana,(2) and thereafter taught trusts and estates to generations of students at Tulane Law School. He was a scholar of Southern social and political history and of the Louisiana Civil Code, and assembled an important and unparalleled collection of rare books in both of those fields.(3) He was the founder of the modern Republican Party in Louisiana. In 1952 he had the imagination and foresight to use national television as a political tool in arguing (successfully) that his Louisiana Eisenhower delegation should be seated at the Republican National Convention. He was a wizard at bridge, and regularly cleaned his friends' clocks in their weekly game at the Louisiana Club. In all this, he had an exuberant spirit, an irrepressible joie de vivre, that pervaded all he did. As his colleague Henry Friendly wrote in 1985, "We admire him for his wisdom but we love him for his courage and good humor, for the quick smile and the warm hand of friendship."(4)

The Judge was the consummate teacher. Dean Barry Sullivan was certainly correct when he wrote:

For generations of young lawyers, Judge Wisdom has been the great teacher. I do not mean only his clerks, but also the friends of his clerks, the clerks of his friends, the spouses and children of his clerks, his students at Tulane, the students he has taught at all the other law schools with which he has been associated, his students at seminars for new judges, young lawyers who have argued before him, and young lawyers who have met him on the street, at plays, at concerts, at the opera, in museums, and in all the other places that he and Bonnie frequent. He has taught us all so many things. He has taught by his example that one can live a life of rectitude, that one can follow [high] principles, ... that one can believe in the duties of citizenship, and that one ought to care about the quality of the lives that others lead.(5) I was fortunate to serve as Judge Wisdom's law clerk from August 1966 through August 1967, and to have profited from his...

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