The straight road: a tribute to Burke Marshall.

• Author: MacKinnon, Catharine A.
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Testimonial

Burke Marshall was the kind of man you'd name your son after, a person who was also a personage. Of his many stately deeds, it is the person I remember.

We first met personally in 1977, as I was graduating from law school, and our connection never flagged for over a quarter of a century. As a member of my doctoral committee, he was unobtrusively helpful; as book endorser, generous; as coauthor of Supreme Court briefs, his steady hand was clear, incisive, brilliant without flash. As legal advisor, engaged colleague, and supportive, present friend, he was always there.

Ever present tense, Burke was so much himself, open, curious, informed, a bit guarded. With Burke, you got a lot more than what you saw. He was a kind of radical, an egalitarian personally and politically. What made it possible for him to be who he became under Kennedy was also what made his connection to someone like me possible. He was unassuming and unpretentious. He loved riding to fancy events in my beat-up 1982 Isuzu pickup, previously a delivery vehicle for an auto parts store, and he always asked after its health. He had a quietness that didn't stick out, disappearing into an audience or a hallway, and you got the feeling he liked it that way. From race to sex--on sex he was less visible but no less passionate--from public to private, the person and the personage gave lived meaning to the word integrity.

But what comes back most indelibly is that voice--flinty, gravelly, a bit reedy, ever so slightly patrician--in which he delivered his laconic, epigrammatic, telegraphic views, often with a bit of a barb lurking in there that could be missed, but that it was good not to underread or underestimate, buried under his reserve and so much tact. In that voice, he delivered his one-to-one words-to-meaning ratio. No gossip, all inside story. No heavy judgment, all good counsel. Pithy without being terse, he got to the essence of things and people, summing up everyone and everything in--now that I count them--eight words or less.

From twenty-five years of our long-running conversation comes back his personal generosity, the way he never forgot who people really were. "He's an awfully nice fellow"--this of Ramsey Clark, whom he knew from Justice Department days and I was litigating against at the time. "Terrific stuff"--this of Renata Adler on libel, whom he took me to hear reading and speaking on that work. (1) "She's the real thing"--this of federal judge Gabrielle Kirk...