Monday, October 15, 2007

THE CONSTITUTION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL, 1962-2007: As reported over at Volokh Conspiracy, Professor David Currie has passed away. Among Chicagoans -- a term I use geographically, but might equally employ to describe a state of mind -- Currie was a legend, a man who bucked legal trends to create his own brand of scholarship, who championed legal rigor and disassembled legal hypocrisies, and who did it all with a mischievous smile and a twinkle in his eye. His mind and wit were a whip, smart and sharp, making his classes as terrifying as they were edifying and fun. Currie's research interests in the last two decades of his life might have seemed to some as if conceived on a dare -- read everything the Supreme Court has ever said, or everything a Congressman ever put on the record, and see what you can tease out of it about the Constitution -- and have been criticized as "law office history" (historians hate his work, which Herb Hovenkamp once called "chronology without history"). Currie, though, understood that you can't know what's going to be important until you find it, and he didn't want the Constitutional debates in the early Supreme Court and Congresses to disappear simply because nobody made any rigorous effort to catalogue and understand them. And once Currie happened upon something he found interesting, he had a raconteur's way of making it interesting to others, whether in efficient, conversational law review articles or in his conspiratorial Burl-Ives debating voice.

I spent a few hours a week as a research assistant for Professor Currie for a year, trying to help him figure out why the early Congress thought its commission of a Virus Agent was constitutional (short answer: it didn't, at least once the virus agent innoculated some people with live smallpox) and chasing down what early muckety-mucks really thought of trying Benedict Arnold -- which, I suspect, Currie might recently have employed in writing about traitors and terrorists of a different stripe. When people ask me about my favorite professors, Currie is one of the three I always cite. The other two, who are all over the news right now, both commented to me, back when I was in law school, about how I should appreciate the opportunity to learn from Currie. I did, and I know a lot of you did too.

Fun Currie trivia: Currie clerked for Frankfurter the year of Baker v. Carr, when Frankfurter hectored Whittaker into a nervous breakdown.

Eternal gratitude to the first person who posts a link to the Moby Dick of legal comedy, "The Least Consequential Justice." (Or was it "Least Significant"? There is a reason I've been unable to find it, I think.)

ETA: The Law School's official obituary. And really, if you're at all interested and you have a Westlaw, Lexis, or JSTOR password, follow the link in the comments to The Most Insignificant Justice and enjoy Currie's scholarly humor.

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