Tribute to R. Kent Greenawalt: A Common-Law Thinker in a Text Driven Age

Kent Greenawalt was my colleague and friend for half a century. Over those years, we shared responsibility both for students at the beginning of their legal studies and for candidates for the doctoral degree. The course in Legal Methods, while we each taught it, was an intensive three-week, thirty-nine class hour introduction to legal studies that divided its attention between common law case analysis and statutory interpretation; Kent’s nuanced understanding of both profoundly shaped my approach to each. In the doctoral program, he offered a graduate seminar on jurisprudence; my responsibility was for a seminar on legal education. Sharing these few students opened for me a window into his open and balanced approach to a subject easily given to forms of orthodoxy, the affection and deep respect his students had for him, and his extraordinary qualities as a mentor for students who would themselves go on to distinguished positions in legal education