A tribute to professor Arthur Austin.

• Author: Gabinet, Leon
• Position: Case Western Reserve University School of Law - Testimonial

I met Arthur Austin in 1968. I had just arrived in Cleveland from Oregon to begin my career as a law professor after fifteen years of practice. (2) Arthur arrived at the same time from Cleveland State University, where he had already been a law professor for some time. It was a strange and exciting period. Tanks were lined up along Adelbert Road, and students were in revolt. After all, it was the era of the Hough Riots and Vietnam. (3) Although the Kent State affair was still a couple of years in the future, (4) a strange and eerie quiet pervaded the law school. Our students, most of whom were somewhat older than the undergraduates and some of whom were Vietnam veterans, remained (for the time being) aloof from the feverish aura of revolutionary talk that pervaded other parts of the campus. Undergraduates appeared on the stairs of the old law school building offering to "liberate" the school, but our students declined their assistance.

This was the state of affairs when Arthur Austin and I first began a forty-four year discourse, a conversation that has endured to the present time and that continues notwithstanding his recent retirement. Arthur was a Korean War veteran, and I was a veteran of the Second World War. We both shared a healthy respect for the rule of law, the democratic process, and the common law tradition that had shaped our country and its institutions. We looked with awe and wonder at a generation that seemed not to care for those things and that regarded them as "irrelevant." What a time to be teaching Antitrust and Federal Income Taxation! How less "relevant" could we be?

Still, Arthur's classes (and I am glad to say my own) were filled. I can say with assurance, based on my conversations with students, that Arthur made Antitrust very relevant. His combination of intellectual rigor and wry wit made him one of the most popular teachers in the law school, and deservedly so. As for me, my ongoing discourse with Arthur has gone beyond shared observations about government and politics to cover such matters as Arthur's deep interest in southern writers, and particularly William Faulkner. We recently had a serious debate about Faulkner when I was required to write a critical paper on The Sound and the Fury for the Novel Club of...