Tribute to Yale Kamisar.

• Author: Ginsburg, Ruth Bader (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
• Position: Testimonial

When the editors of this issue told me of Professor Yale Kamisar's decision to retire from full-time teaching after a near half century of law faculty service, two thoughts came immediately to mind. First, I thought of the large loss to Michigan students unable to attend his classes and to faculty colleagues at Ann Arbor unable routinely to engage his bright mind. Second, I thought it altogether right for the Michigan Law Review to publish an issue honoring one of the Law School's most prized professors. When invited to write a tribute, I could not resist saying yes.

From his early years as a law teacher, Yale produced pathmarking scholarship. Justice Black, in his opinion for the Court in the historic Gideon v. Wainwright decision, cited one of Yale's articles when Yale was less than a decade out of law school. (1) By 1966, Yale had earned the unofficial title, "Father of Miranda." (2) His scholarship was cited in that landmark decision four times. (3) Yale's 1980 volume, Police Interrogation and Confessions, (4) contains his leading commentary on the procedures of criminal justice. His senior colleague at Michigan, Francis A. Allen, judged the work "one of the great achievements of legal scholarship since the end of the second world war." (5)

Yale has written extensively about the Court on which I now sit. We were co-contributors to The Burger Court: The CounterRevolution That Wasn't. (6) In that 1983 publication, Yale compared the Warren and Burger Courts' decisions regarding police investigatory practices, while I commented on the Burger Court's sex discrimination decisions. (7) Yale's writings on physician-assisted suicide and constitutional law, in addition to his prolific and waypaving work on police behavior, searches and seizures, and confessions, have made him one of the most-cited scholars of his time. (8)

In the courts as well as the academy, Yale's work has attracted an impressive audience. More than thirty Supreme Court opinions have cited Yale's scholarship, and citations to his writings by other federal courts, as well as state courts, number far into the hundreds. Benjamin Cardozo once remarked:

Any morning's mail may bring a law review from Harvard or Yale or Columbia or Pennsylvania or Michigan or a score of other places to disturb our self conceit and show with pitiless and relentless certainty how we have wandered from the path. The reviewer seems to say ... "It is a judgment maim'd and most imperfect." (9) This...