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110 Yale L.J. 903 (2000-2001)
Joseph Goldstein: My Teacher

handle is hein.journals/ylr110 and id is 921 raw text is: Joseph Goldstein: My Teacher

Guido Calabresit
About forty-five years ago, in my second year as a student at the Yale
Law School, an extraordinary group of new faculty members arrived. They
included Alexander Bickel, Charles Black, Abe Goldstein, Leon Lipson,
Ellen Peters, Harry Wellington, and Joe Goldstein. Together with those
who had preceded them by a year, like Louis Pollak and Quintin Johnstone,
there were fourteen or so new arrivals. I believed then, and continue to
think now, that no law school has ever had so remarkable an influx and so
magnificent a burst of creative energy. The new kids-for most were very
young-were brilliant, testy, different from each other and from the
preexisting Yale Law School faculty. And yet they fit right in, with a school
that already had more than its share of academic superstars, and with that
special atmosphere that defined the Yale Law School then, as it does today.
Even in that amazing group, Joe Goldstein stood out from the first.
Others will speak of his scholarship, of the depth of his knowledge,
originality, and teaching capacity in his chosen fields-from which-like
so many others-I have greatly benefited. But in this short Tribute, I want,
instead, to recall Joe as my teacher in a field he knew virtually nothing
about, had-I believe-never taught before, and would certainly never
teach again: the law of bankruptcy.
In those golden days, the universally recognized god of bankruptcy was
a short, round, Montana-born-and-bred, former amateur boxer named J.W.
Moore. He owned the great bankruptcy treatise, Collier on Bankruptcy,' as
he did the multivolume text in the other field he dominated, Moore's
Federal Practice.2 And he was also universally considered to be a superb
classroom teacher. As a result, most of each Yale Law School class-some
165 students-would flock into his bankruptcy course, called Debtors'
Estates (in contrast with Harvard's equivalent, which was named Creditors'
Rights).
t Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; Dean Emeritus, Sterling Professor
Emeritus, and Professorial Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School.
1. JAMES WILLIAM MOORE ET AL., COLLIER ON BANKRUPTCY (14th ed., Matthew Bender
1940) (1898).
2. JAMES WM. MOORE ET AL., MOORE's FEDERAL PRACTICE (2d ed. 1948).
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