Professor James C. Rehberg: Colleague and Friend - Joesph E. Claxton

• Publication year: 1999

Professor James C. Rehberg:

Colleague and Friendby Joseph E. Claxton^*

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Henry Adams

They came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America—men and women whose everyday lives of duty, honor, achievement, and courage gave us the world we have today.

Tom Brokaw

The Greatest Generation

Academicians, as a breed, are somewhat prone to navel gazing. We find great significance in topics we cannot remember clearly (if at all) a few years or even a few months after they have ranked at the top of our agenda. We regularly suffer from a "crisis-of-the-week" syndrome that can cloud our sense of what we are about and cripple our ability to take a long-term view of our professional endeavors. Sometimes, in fact, what we need most is a simple reality check.

My personal "reality check" occupies the office next to mine at the Walter F. George School of Law of Mercer University. His name is Jim Rehberg, and he is a colleague and a friend. He also just happens to be the faculty member who has positively influenced more students, is remembered with affection by more alumni, and is respected more universally than any man or woman who has served on the faculty of the Mercer Law School in the institution's 126-year history.

Jim Rehberg instinctively understood the concept of "lawyer professionalism" long before that term was popularized by lawyers and judges seeking (at times almost desperately) to restore the bar to some semblance of its character in the days before "Rambo" litigation tactics, the curse of hourly billing, and a general incivility of conduct and attitude combined to wreak havoc in the legal profession. Three generations of law students have seen in Jim Rehberg a model of hard work, preparation, commitment, probity, and dignity. First, and always, Jim Rehberg is a true gentleman.

Yet the Jim Rehberg with whom I have served at Mercer is no marble man. On the contrary, he is one of the most genuinely human individuals I have ever encountered. The Jim Rehberg I know matches an intellectual enthusiasm for future interests, of all things, with a deep-rooted passion for baseball in general and the Atlanta Braves in particular. He is the epitome of restrained conservatism in dress, word, and deed, yet he is an unrepentant New Deal Democrat to the very core of his being. He can joke about almost any aspect of his work, while never failing to perform...