Honoring Jane Larson

As January comes to an end, we pause to share with you some of the tributes we’ve received this month honoring our colleague Jane Larson.  We’ve also heard from others who did not send in formal tributes, and there have been a number of commentaries posted elsewhere, to which we provide links below.  On the NLR webpage, we’ve posted a summary of the work that Jane did with other colleagues addressing issues of law, land, and poverty.  We know that the spirit that animated this kind of work can be found in many corners of our profession,  across many parts of our country and of the world — although that work too often goes unremarked and unheralded.  It is our hope that the NLR Project can help in encouraging more conversation at the boundaries of disciplines and communities, in the quiet and ordinary places where law needs translation so that it can serve everyone.  Those are the places where our colleague Jane Larson urged us to go — and as these tributes clearly indicate, her influence will live on.

University of Wisconsin Law School announcement

University of Minnesota Law School announcement

Al Brophy @ the Faculty Lounge

Howard Wasserman @ Prawfsblawg

Guadalupe Luna @ Nuestras Voces Latinas

Diane Marie Amann @ intlawgrrls

Dan Rodriguez @ Northwestern Law Dean’s Blog

Kevin Johnson @ ImmigrationProfBlog

Feminist Law Profs commentary

Brian Leiter @ Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

Obituary @ Madison.com

J. Larson Tributes: Albiston, Balkin, Becker, Bernstein

From KT Albiston — University of California-Berkeley (JSP and Boalt)

I will always remember Jane as being especially welcoming to me when I arrived in Madison.  She reached out to me both professionally and personally, supporting my identity as a newly minted (and very nervous) assistant professor and as a feminist.  We worked together on a project, and she helped me connect to other like-minded scholars interested in gender.  I will always be grateful to her, and she will be sorely missed by so many of us.

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 From Jack Balkin — Yale Law School

I remember when I first met Jane. It was 1990 or shortly thereafter. She had just started teaching, and she was speaking at an academic conference, I believe, about the historians’ brief in Webster, about how historians had to talk about history to judges, and the problems that this raised. She was poised, quiet, confident, charismatic, radiant. I asked Gerald Torres who that amazing person was up there. He said it was a former student, Jane Larson, and that I was quite right, she was indeed amazing. Jane and I became friends at that conference, and over the years, I learned about her erudition, her adventurous intellect, her humor, her graciousness. But now that she is gone, and all too soon, what I remember most is the picture of Jane standing there speaking at that conference, in gauzy brilliance, as if light were streaming from all sides of her. No doubt it still shines where she is now.

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From Mary Becker — DePaul University College of Law

 I remember Jane Larson as a member of the Chicago feminist law group, an informal organization consisting primarily of women teaching in law schools or interested in doing so. Jane was an early member of our group. I remember her with fondness and admiration for her many gifts and her values. She was herself a gifted scholar and very supportive of the work of others, especially the women in the group interested in becoming law professors. Jane had a natural elegance as well as an openness to and appreciation for those without such elegance. Jane was charming, fun, a gift to us.

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 From Anita Bernstein — Brooklyn Law School

Jane and I started our teaching careers a year apart, both of us newcomers to Chicago.  My immediate impression of Jane was she was so darned nice.  Where did she get the time, I’d wonder, to minister so patiently to anxious students, querulous colleagues, fretful acquaintances, the peeved and the perplexed.  All took comfort from Jane—and took their comfort for granted.  I know I did.

Amazing as Jane was on the niceness front, she soared even higher in her writing.  There are only a handful of great publications in feminist torts jurisprudence.  I benefited from them all, but “Women Understand So Little” is the work from which I learn the most with each reread.

Jane argued back in 1993 that lies told to obtain sex–just like lies told to obtain money–ought to be actionable in court.  A stark and novel idea, with supports (including legal history) beautifully mustered.  I’ve assigned Jane’s article in my seminars.  Usually I mention it in my torts class.  Students respond with a mix of resistance and respect; they leave remembering Jane’s thesis.

If you think Jane was wrong about a tort of seduction, you might be right, but I’d encourage you to ask yourself why.  You’ll be thinking along with Jane.  She understood your doubts.

We’ve lost a thinker with a big heart, a nurturer who shared her profound ideas, and a mother who died much too young.

J. Larson Tributes: Bowman, Burns, Crane, Erlanger

Cynthia Grant Bowman — Cornell Law School

Memories of Jane — When I first saw Jane Larson as a new law professor at Northwestern in 1990, I thought she was magical.  The way she walked and talked and belonged in her body attracted me at first.  I soon discovered the magical qualities of her intellect.  I never went into a discussion with Jane without emerging with key insights, ones that would never have occurred to me alone.  She looked at every issue from fresh and imaginative perspectives.  The first edition of the casebook on Feminist Jurisprudence I co-authored in 1994 had the immense benefit of her insights, as did everything I wrote during the period we were colleagues.  I was in awe of her article on the tort of seduction, which appeared at about the same time that I was advocating a feminist revival of common law marriage.  Then-dean Bob Bennett referred to us as his “rock stars” after a sketch of Jane appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  We laughed that both of us progressive feminists were advocating a return to common law traditions that had been abandoned in the name of equality.

I treasured Jane as a friend as well. I’ll always remember the furtive way in which we, as two refugees from large law firms who had not quite shaken that work ethic, sneaked away from the law school to attend Wednesday matinees of the play Angels in America two weeks in a row.  Her witty and gracious speech at the retirement party for Bob Bennett brought down the house.  We were always plotting one thing or another, such as the Op Ed we co-authored to advocate appointment of the women who were then magistrate judges in the Northern District of Illinois to the federal district court.  Before too long, a total of three of these women had been appointed to the bench, and we celebrated at each of their installations.  Not among the least of her accomplishments, her encouragement and assistance in writing a personal ad to be published in The Chicago Reader ultimately led to connecting with my wonderful long-term partner and now-husband.

I know from observing her classes on several occasions that Jane was a spectacular teacher.  She really cared about her students and about the subjects she taught.  Students, especially women students, responded by lining up outside her office door to talk, but she could never bring herself to flee so as to get some work done uninterrupted.  It was totally unsurprising that she won the Best Teacher award on more than one occasion.  She was magic for many more people than just me and contributed to so many lives.  I am only just beginning to accept that Jane is no more.  But I’ll always feel grateful – and changed – for having known her.

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From Bob Burns — Northwestern University Law School

I have a strong recollection of Jane’s vitality and creativity.  During her time at Northwestern, she was at the center of the school’s intellectual life.  Faculty members of very diverse perspectives, including some of our most prominent traditionalists, admired her work and her concern for justice.  She was at the heart of many students’ experience of the school and was an award-winning teacher.  Her interests were broad and adventurous.  (I recall an animated and informed discussion at a Christmas party of a recent exhibition of Caravaggio’s paintings…)  It is hard to believe that someone who was so alive is now gone.

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From Charlotte Crane — Northwestern University Law School

Jane had an extraordinary ability to pull people to her and to the things she cared about.  Some might describe her as “charming,” in all senses of the word.  But “charming” is simply too trite a word to use for her power to make a connection with and influence those around her.   She was nothing short of magnificent.  In the classroom, this magnificence meant students thronged to her classes not just to be instructed but to be educated.   In a scholarly debate, it meant that her position would be presented lucidly but passionately.  In daily interactions, it meant that one would easily be pulled into her concerns and suffer discomfort if unable to respond.   She and the energy she brought with her simply could not be ignored.

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From Howie Erlanger — University of Wisconsin Law School

When I first read of the admiration Jane Larson’s Northwestern colleagues and students had for her, I knew that we at Wisconsin were in for something special when she joined our faculty. And I was not disappointed. At UW, she made enormous contributions to the program, teaching a course (Property) that students love to hate, helping them appreciate the important concepts involved in that area of law, and more important, the social and political context in which those concepts are embedded. Of her other courses, I know the one that meant the most to her was Women’s Legal History, where she could explore questions of social justice over time. She regularly got well-deserved, rave reviews from the students, and she was very interested in the teaching enterprise, regularly participating in the informal discussion group we have around problem-solving and innovations in teaching. But besides all this, she was a warm and concerned person, someone you were always glad to run into in the hall.  Wisconsin’s halls will seem empty without her.