Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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dreds of students might now, as practising lawyers, find that protection of ideas is as exciting a part of the law-game as protection of property. I O 9 Archibald Macleish WHEN a great lawyer is also a great hu- manist it's hard not to write of him as a great man. Zech Chafee wouldn't care for the epithet, but it may well be too late for him to protest. History has glanced at him and history has a way of calling those she looks at by the names that please her. If Zech had stuck to Bills and Notes he would have had his portrait in Langdell and the lively gratitude of generations of Law Students but his Yankee modesty would not have been troubled otherwise. It was when he began to think and then to write and finally to act in defense of the rights of men to be men-of the right of an individual to be an individual-that the first of the muses memorized his name for her chronicles. For he was born-or rather he grew up-into a time in which the defense of the right of an individual to be an individual was a notable, not to say an astonishing thing. People, although they talked about freedom, and made wars for freedom, had ceased to believe in freedom. Particularly the freedom of an individual to be an individual. Free- dom to think as nobody else thought, or as nobody but a very few thought, was con- sidered dangerous if not downright treason- able. People who thought in that way were pinks if they were not actually reds and therefore fair game for any newspaper pub- lisher with the Constitution and his circula- tion to maintain. To say nothing of any politician who wanted to get, or to stay, elected. For a lawyer then, particularly a lawyer who was also a Professor, more par- ticularly a lawyer who was also a Professor at Harvard-for such a man to begin to think and to talk and to act in defense of the right of an individual to be an individual was to ask for trouble and therefore, con- sidering the quarter from which the trouble threatened, to ask for fame. Zech has, of course, other claims. He is not only the prin- cipal defender of the freedom of the human mind in this country-which means, things being what they are, in the world. He is also a man who cares about the human mind- about what comes out of it-about its ca- pacity, its inventiveness, its forms, its reasons, its aspirations, its fantasies. Which is another way of saying that he is a civilized man in a time when not many men are eivilized.- I don,t know how you can add Zech Chafee up-sound scholar, lucid writer, devoted cit- izen, cherished friend, courageous man- without using the adjective which will em- barrass him. If he is not, quite simply, a great American then words have lost their mean- ing. Page seven

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