The center of the circle.

• Author: Kronman, Anthony T.
• Position: Testimonial to late Yale Law School Professor Myres McDougal

I want to welcome you to this afternoon of remembrances celebrating the extraordinary life of our friend and teacher Myres McDougal. The number of people who have gathered here--and even more, the distance that many of you have traveled--speaks volumes about the breadth of Mac's circle of friends, a circle that literally encompasses the globe. Mac stood at the center of a web of allegiances and scholarly collaborations that stretched from New Haven to Tokyo to Bangkok to Delhi to Frankfurt to London and back to New Haven again. During my deanship, I have done a fair bit of traveling, and wherever I go I am always asked two questions: How is the School doing? And how is my friend Mac? I now know that Mac has friends in every great city on earth, and you who are here today are the representatives of that larger assembly.

The life at the center of this global web of friendships had its own center in work. Mac had a gigantic passion for work. He derived visible pleasure from it and managed as effectively as anyone who has ever taught at the School to convey his excitement and enthusiasm for work to the students who were lucky enough to study with him. Not too long before Mac died, he was in and out of the hospital several times. His long-time assistant and dear friend Cheryl DeFilippo would accompany Mac to the hospital and then back again to Evergreen Woods. I spoke with Cheryl after one of these hospital stays--six weeks before Mac's death--and asked how he was doing. She said, "Well, Mac is physically weak but his spirits are strong. When they told him he was about to be released from the hospital, he said that was good news because he had a great deal of work to do and needed to get back to it." The gospelist John wrote, "Let us work, for soon it will be night and then no work can be done."(1) No one understood that sentiment more profoundly than Myres McDougal.

Yet Mac's passion for his work and the work itself--the magnificence of all those books on the library shelf--does not by itself explain why so many have made the trip to be here in New Haven today. As great and brilliant a teacher and scholar as Mac was, he was also a remarkable human being. This is something that everyone who came into his radiant circle understood and grew to appreciate.

In the months since Mac's death, I have received countless letters from former students and friends around the world, and they all have one characteristic in common. Each of these letters expresses immense admiration and respect for Mac's intellectual achievements, but each then goes on to recount an incident of one kind or another that touched the writer in a personal way. I could spend the rest of the afternoon sharing with you the anecdotes recounted in these letters. Let me share just a few.

When Winston Nagan arrived in New Haven in 1975, he had heard a fair bit about Mac and Mac's jurisprudence. He was eager to meet the great man and enrolled in Mac's international law class. Winston describes his experience as follows.

When I came to Yale, I signed up for Mac's...