The genius of Charles Black.

• Author: Kronman, Anthony T.
• Position: Columbia Law School law professor

Before he was a lawyer, and after he became one, Charles Black was a reader of the classics. As a student at the University of Texas in the 1930s, he studied Greek and Latin and read the ancient authors. In later years he reread them, with profit and delight, happy in their company as one is happy with old friends.

I remember Charles telling me, not too long before he and Barbara moved back to New York, that he'd been reading Homer again, as he did every year, and found himself more moved than ever by the stately passion of the poetry--a point he underscored by quoting a long passage in Greek with his rich Texas drawl. Charles's own sense of style, his view of law, with its emphasis on the architectural, even his estimate of human nature, which combined warmth and generosity with a certain Olympian coolness of judgment, were surely shaped by his engagement with the classics, which remained for Charles his whole life a source of pleasure and inspiration.

As a student of the classics, Charles understood the original Roman meaning of the word "genius," a word that derives from the older Greek word genos, meaning kind or type. In Latin, the word genius refers to the specialness of a person or place, its distinctive presiding spirit, the thing that makes it different from all others--its own unique self, which the Romans sometimes thought of as a god, the resident divinity that gives a person or place what we might call its special character.

There can be no doubt that Charles possessed a genius in this sense. In an age of colorless conformity and deference to conventional taste, Charles was one of a kind. He was a real character, in the exact and literal meaning of that phrase, hovering between originality and eccentricity. I can still see Charles, as vividly as I can see all of you, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt for the Law School's annual five-mile run--called (what else?) the Race Judicata--looking like all the other entrants except for the pipe that he smoked from the start of the race to its finish, replenished from time to time with tobacco that Charles carried in a pouch around his waist. I can see Charles in the faculty lounge, surrounded by a pile of 78s and a group of truly amazed students, talking about Louis Armstrong with the same appreciation with which he talked about John Marshall. And I can hear Charles practicing his Icelandic--a language he took up late in life and studied mostly by listening to records while he...