Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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the jurisdiction of federal courts. My first draft was a prosaic collection of the relevant materials. Hartls revision was the Exercise in Dialectici' published separately at my insistence. As always when he gave his mind to any problem, he illumined it as a giant search light sweeps away the darkness anywhere it casts its rays. I have had a large acquaintance in the law but no one I have known has more invited the appraisal that was made of Leonardo: nihil quad tetigit non ornavit. Henry Hart touched nothing that he failed to ornament, as those who worked with him throughout the years in many different fields will testify without reserve. Holmes somewhere said that men may be par- doned for the defects of their qualities if they have the qualities of their defects. Hartjs qualities had two signiticant defects: the first was his reluctance to participate in group endeavors to which he could make enormous contributions, as he did by his exceptional participation in the work of the American Law Institute as an Adviser in the drafting of the Model Penal Code and the Study of Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts. The second was the incurable perfectionism that led him to withhold publication of highly accomplished and creative works that ought to have been shared with other minds, however much he might have added to their quality had nature been more generous in granting him the time. But that he had the quality of these defects cannot be doubted. His inner directed concentration on what he conceived to be his major Work and the punctilious standards he ap- plied in judging his own product cast an elevating influence that will endure. We may hope, nonethe- less, that now that he is gone the unpublished work on which he labored for so long, especially his Holmes lectures, will see the light of day. That plainly is a duty to the law. It is a sorry master whose work surpasses his judgmentg and that master tends toward the perfec- tion of art whose work is surpassed by his judgment. No less than the masters of the Renaissance, Hart's judgment surpassed his work, earning the gratitude of those he left behind. -Herbert Wechsler 5

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Dedication To the Memory of. . HENRY MELVIN HART, JR. Dane Professor of Law An era as rich in legal talent as our own views its inevitable casualties with regret but rarely with the sense that they have measurably weakened the resources of our culture for the understanding and development of law. It was, however, with precisely such a sense of an impoverishing loss that the schools and the best of the profession viewed the death of Professor Henry Melvin Hart. That perva- sive sentiment, no less than the devotion of the last among his students, surely finds expression in the dedication of this Yearbook to the memory of Henry Hart. I should speak first of the devotion of his students, legion as their number must have been in more than thirty teaching years. The simple fact is that the law has known no greater teacher and known very few who were his peers. First, and most importantly I think, he had unique capacity for grasping and developing whatever was important in his subject, marshalling and ordering a system of perceptions that transcended the materials before him, yielding insights of the kind that will survive. Secondly, he had a total empathy for the position of the student, to whose absorbtive powers his dogmatic exposition, softening concessions, searching and perhaps un- answerable questions seemed infallibly attuned. Thirdly, there was a morality in his approach to legal problems that was somehow made explicit in his teaching-the burden he assumed to think through matters where there was a tempting, easy answer, his disdain for lazy, shoddy work, however exalted the position of the worker, his devotion to principle in thought and action, his self-criticism and acknowledgment of error after sober second thought. Finally, there were the subtle graces of his personality-intense but never stiff, friendly but never intimate, respectful but demanding of respect, righteous but never smug, courageous in all things. These are, at least, the qualities that seemed to me on frequent visits to his classroom to explain his pedagogical achievement. Certain it is that the succeeding generations of his students quite revered him as a master. And since, unlike some pedagogues whom I have known, Hart had so much to teach about the vital things that give the law its meaning and its life, his spirit will live on in many other lives, 4 although his voice is still. What I have said about Professor Hart as a law teacher goes a long way towards describing his great impact on the schools and the profession. This is the more remarkable when one considers the relative paucity of his important publications: the course- book on Federal Courts on which we worked to- gether, the coursebook on Legal Process that he undertook with Professor Sacks, still in an avowedly temporary edition, though now used in many schools, his great essay on the work of the Supreme Court, his classic analysis of the aims of the Criminal Law, his revealing paper on the relations between state and federal law, the paper on the power of Congress to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts tprepared for our casebookjg a number of more fugitive con- tributions and the spoken but unpublished Holmes lectures of 1963. But what this summary conceals is the enormous point that everything he did bespoke a seminal, almost Olympian conception of the whole of the great legal process, a conception so original, constructive and revealing that a single paper, fully comprehended, gave the reader a unique and liber- ating sense of the full mission and potentialities of law. The most important work is, of course, the materials on Legal Process which has for its articulate objective just the kind of cosmic view I have at- tempted to describe. It does not depreciate Professor Sacks to say that the profession understands how much of the originality of that great book reflects the thought of Henry Hart. It is as if he had con- cluded that jurisprudence is too important to be left to jurisprudents and set out to teach its most im- portant aspects in the context of familiar legal problems. That he carried the profession on the point is very clear. I cannot speak of our collaborative work beyond saying that I think of those six years as the most rewarding of the many I have spent in law. The method of our work was very largely the exchange of what each thought of as an almost finished draft. The drafts Hart sent to me would, at the most, in- vite some marginal suggestions. There were not many that I sent to him that he would deal with in those terms. The case that I most vividly remember involved material on the power of Congress to limit

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