My Father.

• Author: Goldstein, Joshua
• Position: Yale Law School professor Joseph Goldstein

Let me begin by quoting from a recently discovered letter that my dad wrote to his father, while serving as a lieutenant in the army in occupied Japan. It was 1946 and he was twenty-two years old. Here, already, he is refusing to acquiesce to social conventions--as if they were somehow eternal truths. I quote:

There are so many things that I want to do, so many important things I want to read. I want to work with and for minority groups that must be educated to demand what are their natural rights. I might find that working up within the ranks of a labor union might be my method. One thing I do know--that I enjoy myself most when I am working to better the lot of people that haven't found our democracy real.... You may feel that this so called idealism will wear off. Honestly I don't think it ever will or can for each day I realize how much there is that must be done. Later in the letter, he goes on to urge his father, who is in real estate, to "build some comfortable low cost housing units, with the proviso that Negro families and white will be able to participate as tenants."

To an extraordinary degree, my father lived the life of his youthful aspirations. He was very much a man of the Enlightenment who, while not believing in the perfectibility of man in any simplistic sense, encouraged all of us to strive for the highest possible standards in society and in our public and private lives. He was resolute that we not succumb to the inner voice of caution--the cynical realpolitik of limited possibility. He sometimes called people who did succumb "young fogies."

He loved the Yale Law School, New Haven, and all its people. And whether you were an electrician or a professor, a secretary or a student, he treated you with the deepest respect and was always available to offer his counsel. There was no snobbism or caste hubris with him. In Joe Goldstein's universe, there were only unique individuals with special attributes and ideas. You might think of yourself as a conservative or a liberal, a libertarian or a communist, but to Joe Goldstein you were never simply a representative of any group, who could be easily and glibly labeled. You were a much more complicated organism than that. You were you.

To his many students here, I want to say something about his teaching life that you may not know. Until the end of his life, he prepared for each and every one of his classes with extraordinary diligence. Teaching you was his art form and every...