Four Decades Later

Hal Maier and I have taught on the same faculty for four decades. I still like him and enjoy his company, and there are not many people of whom I can say that forty years later. We have agreed and differed with one another on a whole range of issues, from the shape of the first-year curriculum to politics and back again, but have managed to stay friends through it all. Perhaps this is because we could put our differences to one side in the interest of what we insisted was music back when Hal was the drummer and I the piano player in the Law School's Dixieland band.

(We did our best to drown out Karl Warden's singing, after all.) Or maybe sharing nearly 500 faculty meetings takes the edge off one's disagreements. Whatever the reason, I have certainly profited from having Hal as a colleague, and the Law School is a better place because of his dedication to the transnational studies program, his energy in getting the Journal of Transnational Law off the ground, and his many other accomplishments here. I will much miss seeing him on a day to day basis, and we will all miss his counsel and his good humor.