Ten Teachers Who Shape the Future

British philosopher Edmund Burke once said that the study of law "renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources." In the U.S., 30,000 students per year now graduate from the nation's 164 accredited law schools, and many go on to become powerful influences in government and business as well as law. If they carry with them the virtues that Burke commended, it is largely due to the men and women who have taught them. Some such figures are already legends--Paul Freund of Harvard, for example, or Philip Kurland of Chicago. But among the generation now in midcareer, there are also a remarkable number of gifted law professors: brilliant scholars, provocative teachers, concerned public servants, ardent advocates--often all combined in one impressive individual. With the counsel of judges and lawyers, students and teachers, TIME has selected ten outstanding ones:

TO KNOW THE ENVIRONMENT: BRUCE A. ACKERMAN, 33, of Yale. Educated at Harvard and Yale Law. Clerked for Justice John M. Harlan. Married to Yale economics professor; two children.

"It's scary," says Ackerman, "that in ten years these kids are going to be leaders, and that this law school is the last chance they'll get to systematically study fundamental questions." By systematic study, Ackerman does not mean limiting oneself to law. In his course on environmental law, he requires students to grapple with such arcana as hydrologic modeling and the chemistry of air pollution. Convinced that practicing law is much more than winning a case, Ackerman confronts his students with basic, philosophical questions--e.g., "What is justice?" In his course on social justice--he is now writing a book (his fourth) on the subject--he challenges students to "construct a new political-legal order in which values of individual freedom are synthesized with a richer sense of social justice."

TO FIGHT AGAINST DEATH: ANTHONY G. AMSTERDAM, 41, of Stanford. Educated at Haverford and University of Pennsylvania Law. Clerked for Justice Felix Frankfurter. Married to a civil rights lawyer; three children (two from an earlier marriage).

A passionate advocate of civil liberties (and good cigars), Amsterdam has submitted more than 100 briefs to the Supreme Court. Among the cases in which he has been involved: Ernesto Miranda, Martin Luther King, Gary Gilmore. In 1972, with Amsterdam representing 450 of the 600 convicts on death row, the Supreme Court decided in Furman v. Georgia that the haphazard enforcement of capital punishment was unconstitutional. Now that the court has upheld some death-penalty laws, he says his strategy is to fight "to keep as few people from getting killed as possible." As a teacher, Amsterdam believes that by traditionally stressing legal theory, law schools fail to offer students a sense of everyday practice. To remedy this, he instituted an advanced criminal law seminar that required the twelve students to take an actual prosecution and build their own defense cases from pre-trial procedure to courtroom maneuvers. This year he is focusing on defenses for the criminally insane. Says Amsterdam: "Law students can learn more from knowing how to ask good questions than from studying appellate briefs. To be able to make split-second decisions, they have to feel the law in their bones."

TO JUDGE VALUES: GUIDO CALABRESI, 44, of Yale. Studied at Yale, Oxford (Rhodes scholar), Yale Law. Clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black. Married; three children.

Calabresi, who left Milan with his parents when he was seven, earned two degrees in economics but decided that the field was "just a game." What he finds "interesting about law is that it deals in concrete terms with fundamental value conflicts." Bringing that philosophical approach even to his estates and gift-tax course, Calabresi is specially fond of his first-year class in torts. Says he: "I love teaching, and there is something particularly appealing about teaching a subject that seems to deal with the lowest kind of relationships--accidents, ambulance chasing--because you can show students that these raise the most fundamental questions about the structure of society. And if somewhere, some time, something a law professor does hasn't a practical effect, he hasn't been a good law scholar or teacher." In 1970 Calabresi stamped his own mark on the law with the publication of The Costs of Accidents, a major contribution to the growth of no-fault insurance laws.

TO ATTACK A STEREOTYPE: RUTH BADER GINSBURG, 44, of Columbia. Studied at Cornell, Harvard Law and Columbia Law. Married to tax lawyer; two children.

Her parents had suggested a career as a high school teacher--good security for a woman--but Ruth Ginsburg believes that sex barriers are to be toppled. As one of four unpaid general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg argued--and last week won--her fourth major Supreme Court women's rights case, promising equal benefits for widows and widowers under Social Security. Her successful strategy: "To attack the most pervasive stereotype in the law--that men are independent and women are men's dependents." Ginsburg encourages her students to join in preparing her cases. Such experience, she hopes, will help young lawyers pursue what Ginsburg sees as one goal of the law: "To reflect and respond to the needs of the society it serves, preserving freedom while preventing turmoil."

TO TEACH BY LEARNING: WILLIAM KENNETH JONES, 46, of Columbia. Studied at Columbia and Columbia Law. Clerked for Justice Tom C. Clark. Briefly practiced private law in Cleveland. Married; three children.

When New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller asked Jones in 1970 to serve on the Public Service Commission because he was a well-known expert on antitrust and regulatory law, Jones agreed but only on condition that he could continue teaching at Columbia. But even while teaching, he also enrolled himself as a student in statistical techniques. Says he: "Mathematics is going to be an increasingly important part of legal development, and I do not wish to become obsolete." There is little danger of that, for Jones applies the same tactic to his teaching. Says he: "The largest part of teaching law is learning law. Then it's essentially a matter of reconstructing how I was able to gain a particular insight or understand a particular problem, and then presenting it to the students in a way that will enable them to get over the same difficulties. The best way to teach law is to have students who are asking the right questions. I press students to perform at their highest capacity."

TO INQUIRE AND ANALYZE: YALE KAMISAR, 47, of the University of Michigan. Studied at New York University and Columbia Law. Married to a Michigan graduate student; three sons by a first wife.

He has been criticized by stuffier colleagues as "too commercial," but the zesty expert on criminal law accepts that tag as a compliment. For Kamisar, who once longed to be a sportswriter, "the lawyer is the great translator" who should strive to make legal principles clear to the general public. Kamisar has churned out many articles for magazines and newspapers, sometimes working through the night when he is pursuing a good idea. He is a witty performer in the classroom, cajoling, infuriating, charming his students--all the while, he says, "trying to develop a certain kind of mind, a legal mind, that inquires, analyzes, organizes and discriminates." Kamisar sees the law as "the nervous system of civilization, a never-ending process, constantly changing and never finished." He himself does not practice law, however, because, he says, he wants to keep his credibility unimpaired.

TO MODERNIZE THE FAMILY: HERMA HILL KAY, 42, of the University of California, Berkeley. Educated at Southern Methodist and University of Chicago Law. Clerked for California Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Traynor. Married to a psychiatrist (her third husband); no children.

As a sixth-grader back in Orangeburg, S.C., Kay was the only student willing to debate in favor of the resolution that the South should have lost the Civil War. She argued for that heresy so well that the teacher advised her to become a lawyer. She was the driving force behind California's Family Law Act of 1969, which first established the principle of no-fault divorce. She teaches courses in family law, sex discrimination (she and Ruth Ginsburg collaborated on a widely used casebook on the subject), and joins with Berkeley Anthropologist Laura Nader in a seminar on anthropology and the law. Often mentioned as a candidate to become the first woman Supreme Court Justice, Kay believes that law school should turn out students who are "able to separate the relevant from the irrelevant and focus on the core of a problem." In her office hangs a portrait of former Israeli Premier Golda Meir with the caption, "But can she type?"

TO PROTECT THE CONSUMER: ROBERT PITOFSKY, 47, of Georgetown University. Studied at N.Y.U. and Columbia Law. Worked seven years for the Wall Street firm of Dewey, Ballantine. Married to a personnel consultant; three children.

The Carter Administration reportedly considered naming Pitofsky to head the Federal Trade Commission but then counted him out, perhaps, says a colleague, because of his "professorial air." Though undeniably a professor--he teaches antitrust and consumer law--Pitofsky is certainly no stranger to the FTC, having served from 1970 to 1972 as chief of its Bureau of Consumer Protection. As a teacher, Pitofsky favors the adversary system. Assigning a pair of students to each side of a lawsuit, Pitofsky gives them 30 days to prepare their arguments and then grills them on the law. Law students, says Pitofsky, who has a cool, unruffled pedagogical style, "must learn to be precise in speech and written expression. They must understand and abide by the notion of relevance." Unlike most law professors, Pitofsky is affiliated with a law firm, serving as a counselor to the prestigious D.C. law firm of Arnold & Porter.

TO SEEK JUSTICE: LAURENCE H. TRIBE, 35, of Harvard Studied at Harvard and Harvard Law. Clerked for Justice Potter Stewart. Married to a planner in the Massachusetts department of mental health; two children.

When Tribe was all of 20, he was studying the mysteries of algebraic topology, but he found that "a bit lonely," so he turned to law, joining the faculty at the age of 26. Now finishing his fourth book, a major analysis of U.S. constitutional law, Tribe has also advised politicians and institutions on such varied issues as the right to die and whether Massachusetts should require deposits on soft-drink bottles. Tribe is celebrated among students for his knack in jazzing up constitutional issues (he recently had them argue whether the President could be impeached for an armed intervention in Angola). Tribe also tries "to teach a little bit about justice." Says he: "There is a certain resistance among the students. The idea is that if you talk about justice, you should be in the divinity school. And the kids are here because they are, in a sense, the best technicians. But the answer, I guess, is that we can't afford the luxury of not talking about justice."

TO UNDERSTAND VIOLENCE: FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING, 34, of the University of Chicago. Studied at Wayne State University and Chicago Law. Married; two children.

Fascinated by sociology since his student days, Zimring injects social science techniques into the study of criminal law problems, and in the past decade has carved out his own research duchy: the measure and study of violence. Says his former teacher and mentor, Norval Morris, now Chicago's law dean: "Zimring knows more about violence and firearms than anyone else ever." Zimring, who joined the Chicago faculty at 24, also heads the university's Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. He devotes his summers at the center to analyzing such topics as homicide patterns in Chicago. Though he commutes regularly to Washington to share his findings with various national commissions, Zimring prefers the classroom, where he walks a tightrope between "bullying and pushing benignly," always wary, he says, "of infecting students with my own biases." He describes his attitude toward the law as "eclectic, skeptical, not tied to theory." Says he: "The law expresses aspirations that we may not be able to practically achieve. But there is nothing wrong with seeing the law exhibit aspiration."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.