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109 Yale L.J. 1267 (1999-2000)
Judge Wisdom, the Great Teacher and Careful Writer

handle is hein.journals/ylr109 and id is 1309 raw text is: Judge Wisdom, the Great Teacher and Careful Writer Allen D. Black' Without a doubt, history will remember Judge Wisdom primarily for his strength and courage in leading the Fifth Circuit and the lower federal courts to end racial segregation in the South. That is as it should be. Judge Wisdom's work in civil rights cases conferred upon millions of Americans the full stature of equal citizenship, and made him a giant of the law and a hero of the nation. I write, however, to praise some other outstanding characteristics of this kind and gentle man, in particular his genius as a teacher and his devotion to careful writing. Judge Wisdom excelled at everything he did. As a practicing lawyer he tried and won important cases in both Louisiana and federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States.' He was instrumental in bringing the common-law concept of trusts into the civil law of Louisiana, and thereafter taught trusts and estates to generations of students at Tulane Law School. He was a scholar of Southern social and political history and of the Louisiana Civil Code, and assembled an important and unparalleled collection of rare books in both of those fields.3 He was the founder of the modern Republican Party in Louisiana. In 1952 he had the imagination and foresight to use national television as a political tool in arguing (successfully) that his Louisiana Eisenhower delegation should be seated at the Republican National Convention. He was a wizard at bridge, and regularly cleaned his friends' clocks in their weekly game at the Louisiana Club. In all this, he had an exuberant spirit, an irrepressible joie de vivre, that pervaded all he did. As his colleague Henry Friendly wrote in 1985, Partner, Fine, Kaplan and Black, Philadelphia. Pa.; Law Clerk to Judge Wisdom. 1966- 1967. 1. See, e.g., Schwegmann Bros. v. Calvert Distillers Corp.. 341 U.S. 384 (1951). 2. See, e.g., John Minor Wisdom, A Trust Code in the Civil Law. Based on the Restatement and Uniform Acts: The Louisiana Trust Estates Act, 13 TUL. L. REV. 70 (1938). 3. Judge Wisdom donated his collection of rare books, as well as his judicial papers, to Tulane Law School. They are now housed as the John Minor Wisdom Collection at the Tulane Law Library. 1267

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