Tribute to Professor Doug Rendleman

Abstract

Doug Rendleman’s retirement will be a large change in my legal landscape. Doug and I share the often-neglected field of Remedies. Clients rarely care about a liability determination. The remedy is the bottom line of justice, as we once titled a symposium, and the plaintiff hasn’t recovered anything until she gets an effective remedy.

I never served on the same faculty with Doug, so I never knew him in his usual habitat. But I have known him from a distance for more than forty years. We would always get together, often for lunch but at least for a drink or a conversation, at the annual meetings of the Association of American Law Schools and the American Law Institute. We shared not just an interest in remedies, but in injunctions and equity in particular. For fourteen years, we served together as Advisers to the Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, which brought us together a third time each year.

Doug is a link to the early days of remedies as a field. He began his career at Alabama in 1970, and taught a course called Remedies, from a casebook assigned to him by his senior colleagues. The book began with the forms of action—the pleading rules of the writ system, abolished by then in every U.S. jurisdiction, but still taught into the 1970s at a handful of American law schools.