Yale Kamisar the teacher.

• Author: Lehman, Jeffrey S.
• Position: Testimonial

I first heard Yale Kamisar's name in the spring of 1977 while deciding where to go to law school. The then Dean of Admissions at Michigan suggested I call a graduate practicing law near me in upstate New York. The graduate eloquently endorsed Michigan. But what impressed me most was his statement, "When you go to Michigan you must be sure to take a course from a professor named Yale Kamisar. That course changed the way I thought about law. Every day we'd go to class and talk about interesting cases and I was always confused. But at the very end of the course, when I was studying for exams, I figured it out. Professor Kamisar thought all those cases were wrongly decided!"

Others who have studied with Yale might wonder why it took that student until the end of the course to understand what Yale was saying. I suspect he was exaggerating a little bit for the benefit of a prospective student. In any event, it worked. The statement stayed with me when I arrived in Ann Arbor.

As a first-year law student, I was assigned to Jerry Israel's criminal law class, and a friend of mine was assigned to Yale. Unlike the upstate New York graduate I had spoken with, however, my friend was ambivalent. He acknowledged that Yale was "entertaining," but worried that Yale was spending too much time going over and over and over the same, straightforward issues, of "intent" and "causation." How, my friend fretted, could he be fully prepared for practice if he had a robust understanding of questions like those at the price of a lost opportunity to master the difference between embezzlement and larceny by trick? I'm sure that with the benefit of hindsight, my friend appreciates the wisdom of Yale's choices.

As my law student years progressed, I kept hearing "Kamisar stories." He was a faculty member who loomed larger than life. For example, one day he told his nine a.m. class he had been up until three in the morning finishing an article, that he wasn't prepared, and that he was going to reschedule the session. I daresay he's not the only professor ever to show up for class unprepared; but Yale had the integrity to confess that to his students and to cancel class for the day, rather than trying to bluff his way through the hour.

Notwithstanding Yale's reputation, I somehow managed to reach my final year of law school without having taken a course from him. So that fall I signed up for criminal procedure a la Kamisar. I learned a lot about the Fourth Amendment and...