Yale Kamisar: collaborator, colleague, and friend.

• Author: Choper, Jesse H.
• Position: Testimonial

Yale Kamisar was absent when I was first interviewed by a number of faculty members from the University of Minnesota Law School where he was then teaching. These sessions took place between Christmas and New Year's in 1959 (when I was a third-year student at Penn), at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, that year in St. Louis. Yale had planned to be there, I was told, but cancelled because he was behind schedule in completing an article. So while I didn't meet him on that occasion, I surely learned what would ring familiar many times during our long and fruitful association.

About three weeks later, I met the man in person in the Twin Cities when I came for a formal interview at the Law School. His reputation already preceded him although he was only in his third year of teaching, following two years as an associate at Covington & Burling, and an interrupted law school schedule for a stint of combat duty in Korea where, as a twenty-two-year-old infantry lieutenant, he commanded the assault platoon in an attack on "T-Bone Hill" and received the Purple Heart. (Given Yale's drive and tenacity, I have long been puzzled as to why the North just didn't give up then.) As I recall it, we had not yet finished shaking hands when he began quizzing me (to put it mildly) on a Student Comment that I had published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review on a recent Fourth Amendment decision of the Supreme Court, Draper v. United States. (1) I was critical of the ruling, which had upheld an arrest based on hearsay that a near-unanimous Court found to have been corroborated and thus to have constituted probable cause; Yale defended the Court's ruling. This was the first and the last time, at least in respect to criminal procedure, that I (or probably anybody else) reached a more liberal conclusion than Yale did. (I've always suspected that he supported my appointment to the faculty for my position, even though he continued to disagree with it--I can't recall him ever telling me that he had changed his mind.)

After immediately accepting Minnesota's offer, I joined the faculty a year later, in the Fall of 1961, after completing a judicial clerkship. Yale and I quickly became friends, and during that first year Bill Lockhart and he invited me to join them on a new constitutional law casebook for which Lockhart, then a distinguished senior constitutional law scholar, had a contract with West Publishing. So began my professional...