Remarks for Robert Burt.

• Author: Post, Robert C.
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Testimonial

The following remarks by Dean Post were delivered at Professor Burt's funeral. The remaining Tributes are drawn from remarks delivered at a memorial service held at the Yale Law School on November 1, 2015.

I am here today as Dean of the Yale Law School, where Bo has been an honored member of the faculty since 1976, having previously served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

I am here, that is to say, in something of a representative capacity. It is my privilege to offer on behalf of the entire Yale community our deepest condolences to Linda, to Anne and to Jessica, to Jeffrey, to Carolyn, to Tessa, Delayna, and Ella. Our broken hearts go out to you in support and love.

As Dean, it is my particular privilege to express the affection and the esteem in which Bo was held by his peers and colleagues at the Law School. This is a subject about which I could say a great deal.

I could, for example, discuss Bo's exemplary scholarly originality and courage. Bo is the last true representative of the perspective, once strong at Yale in the personages of Bo's mentors Joseph Goldstein and Jay Katz, of a psychoanalytically informed understanding of persons. Bo was deeply steeped in psychoanalysis, and he used that perspective to write with wisdom and subtlety about human interactions in the face of extreme conditions like death and medical necessity. He also used the insights of psychoanalysis to form a strikingly original theory about the role of law in public social ordering.

Bo adopted a paradoxical perspective on law, a perspective that informed virtually all of his work. Most law professors regard law as a dispute-settlement mechanism. When there is conflict in society, law intervenes to provide the just resolution of disagreement. But Bo believed that law should not be conceived as a mere repository of answers that resolve and settle social conflicts.

For Bo, social conflict was unavoidable and pervasive; it ceaselessly derived from psychological needs that always reside in persons. What mattered to Bo, therefore, was not so much the resolution of conflict but the process of conflict resolution. He conceptualized law as a method of channeling conflicts in ways likely to make disputes constructive.

Bo was drawn to those aspects of law that could create pathways of conflict allowing the full play of human ambivalence and interdependence to be expressed under conditions of agonistic equality. He learned from...