Arthur's Words

Abstract

When Arthur Leff died, it was only the more acute pain of personal grief that dimmed for me the immense institutional and intellectual loss that we all had suffered. We were not to have the books and articles which would have followed upon Law and and Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law. Any one who has known the acute, biting, yet gentle spirit of mockery that pervaded Arthur's later work can appreciate what we have been denied. We knew, however, that the major project that Arthur had begun at the time of his illness was a law dictionary. Many of us had been treated at one time or another to a recitation of some finely crafted definition that Arthur was preparing. Yet, at the time of his death no one except Susan Leff had glimpsed more than a handful of the many hundreds of entries that Arthur had finished.