Friday, January 5, 2007

MANY A PROMISING CAREER HAS BEEN RUINED BY THE PRACTICE OF ANTITRUST LAW: Sorry to say that I, like everybody else on Leslie Skolnick Hauser's U of C listserv, just heard the sad news about Bernie Meltzer's passing. For those that don't know the details of a career that included stints as a New Deal insider, a Nuremburg prosecutor (his annual reminiscences of this were a highlight of the law school calendar), a labor lawyer, and, by all accounts, that rarity among legal scholars, a dedicated teacher, here's an account.

By the time I got to Chicago, Meltzer was long past the prime of his legal career, but he remained warm and generous with his time and advice -- the title of this post is what he said to me when I told him I really enjoyed my antitrust class. At the law school auction, a friend and I won lunch with him, where he told stories with misleading and unwarranted modesty about how he lucked into many of the highlights of his career. We tried to talk him into teaching a class, which his wife vetoed for health reasons, so we were left to regret not showing up soon enough to learn more from him.

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