Reflections of a Fellow Teacher

Abstract

It has been my good fortune to have enjoyed the friendship of Vernon Miller throughout the some forty years that we have both been law teachers. Whether because we had shared a common experience as graduate fellows at Yale, or because we both had the advantage of teaching in a number of different schools about the country, or because we simply had the same fundamental attitudes about teaching and scholarship, Dean Miller and I early established a strong common bond and over the years have been able to cooperate easily and happily in many different activities in the law teaching enterprise. It was my especially good fortune to have been President-elect while he was President of the Association of American Law Schools and, hence, to have received an invaluable apprenticeship under his skilled direction. The fundamental attitudes and policies which have moved Dean Miller in his preeminent performance of all the different roles of legal educator are best expressed in his eloquent presidential address to the Association of American Law Schools, "Law Schools in the Great Society." He there describes himself as a "confirmed" American legal realist, though somewhat "mellowed over the years." 'From his "devotion to the facts of the case" he does not expect to become "apostate," and his principal emphasis for all his constituencies is upon the improvement of procedures for the better securing of well-established goals. As an educator, his primary concern, he insists, is for improvement in the quality of teaching; and his concern is nationwide, extending from the "prestige" schools to the most marginal—in assumption of responsibility for the profession as a whole. For the young teacher he recommends not merely "caselaw research, pure science techniques and fact-finding projects" but also active experience in professional associations. For particular schools he recommends an increasing democratization in the making of important decisions, and he points with pride to the enhanced potentialities of the Association of American Law Schools both for promoting this democracy and for protecting particular schools within the "orbit" of their larger institutions;