Charles Reich: Due Process in the Eye of the Receiver

Abstract

I start and end with the same story: of Charles Reich and his purple chair. It is a tale of personhood and community, and how one fosters the other.

I came to know and love Charles around 1990, when Yale's greatest and most generous Dean, Guido Calabresi, brought Charles back home to teach at Yale Law School after many years away. On our way back after a remarkably warm introductory lunch, Charles and I stopped by my office, which stood just a few doors down from his. Mid-conversation, Charles suddenly spied in the corner of my office a purple chair, which I had picked up from the hallway trash a few years earlier. "Where. Did. You. Get. That. CHAIR?" he asked in a trembling voice. But before I could answer, he kicked it over, revealing underneath in large capital letters the name "REICH!" "My purple chair!" he howled with childlike joy. "May I have this back?" What could I say? Even while I was nodding yes, he raced from the room carrying the chair back to his own visiting office. He swung the door open and proudly placed the chair next to its exact twin: an identical purple chair!

He turned back to me smiling. "When I left Yale 20 years ago, I asked Burke Marshall to keep these two chairs for me. But when I returned, there was only one. I felt lost without its companion. But now," Charles beamed, "I'm home and I'm whole." As if to underscore the point, he sat down proudly in the chair, pleased and satisfied, wearing a delighted look of childlike glee.