Prodigious Professor

Not long ago, U=S. law schools were dominated by aging scholars, experts in the traditional legalisms of writs, torts, contracts and real property. The civil rights revolution has helped to change all that. Led largely by lawyers, it has spawned a new breed of young law professors-- awesome activists in the courtroom as well as the classroom.

None is more awesome or more activist than Anthony G. Amsterdam of the Uni versity of Pennsylvania.

Tony Amsterdam is 30. Toiling 20 hours a day, he spends 40% of his time teaching criminal law at Penn, most of the rest traveling around the country trying civil rights cases for which he gets no fee. Last month he hit New Orleans to argue his umpteenth case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He next surfaced in Washington, advising the White House Conference on Civil Rights.

Last week he filed another Supreme Court petition involving Negro rioters in Los Angeles.

Of necessity, Amsterdam has learned to work 72 hours without sleep. Last summer he drove across the U.S. with out stopping to rest-- twice. He is a part-time poet, playwright and novelist; he is equally versed in poker, tennis, two foreign languages (French, Span ish), and he has mastered the arts of advocacy from the Supreme Court to the police courts of Mississippi. "He is," says one federal judge, "the most dazzling person I have ever met in my entire life."

The tall, intense, totally organized son of a prosperous Philadelphia lawyer, Amsterdam graduated from Haverford College summa cum laude in 1957, determined "to learn everything in the world." He pursued a graduate degree in art history at Bryn Mawr while he went to Penn law school, stood No. 1 in his class, edited the law review and sharpened the "void for vagueness" doctrine (meaning failure to specify an offense) that has since invalidated many an unjust Southern law.

Astounding Memory. In 1960, Jus tice Felix Frankfurter chose Amsterdam as his Supreme Court law clerk, the only non-Harvard man Frankfurter ever picked. It was a meeting of two omnivorous minds. "He was a man committed to the breadth of life," recalls Amsterdam, who edited Frankfurter's unpublished memoirs. "We got along marvelously."

In 1962, after a frenetic year as a U.S. prosecutor in Washington, Amsterdam joined the Penn law faculty and started moonlighting as a top tactician for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund. In case after case he has astounded judges with his ability to remember hundreds of citations going back to the birth of the Republic. At one hearing, when the judge could not find one of Amsterdam's citations, an unruffled Amsterdam suggested: "Your Honor, your book must be misbound." It was. In New Orleans last winter, he flipped through the apparently hopeless appeal of a Mississippi Negro accused of possessing whisky, and turned the case into a legal landmark--the first federal court decision extending the Sixth Amendment right to counsel from felony cases to misdemeanors (TIME, Jan. 29).

Unfolding Technique. Last summer Amsterdam led 30 law students through 250 counties in eleven Southern states to analyze a 25-year collection of 2,600 rape cases--a major study of Southern "dual justice." Last spring Amsterdam also produced a memorable 119-page article in the Penn law review on the "removal" of civil rights cases from state to federal courts. Indeed, Amsterdam is the leading scholar of that unfolding technique, one of the big developments in U.S. law. While honing dozens of Legal Defense Fund briefs, he is also writing a lengthy trial manual for all U.S. defense lawyers, to be distributed by the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute.

Amsterdam is not so much an advocate of more civil rights as he is a crack criminal lawyer seeking better protection of existing rights. The rights themselves have been won--from free expression in 1789 to equal voting in " 1965. And yet, he says, the American citizen may still be "arrested, jailed, fined under guise of bail and put to every risk and rancor of the criminal process if he expresses himself unpopularly." In the years ahead, Amsterdam intends to concentrate on making "the paper right a practical protection."

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