IN MEMORIAM

Paul J. Mishkin

Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1927 – 2009

 

 

Paul J. Mishkin, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the jurisdiction and role of the federal courts, died at his Berkeley home on June 26, 2009, after a brief illness. He was 82.

 

Paul J. Mishkin was born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey, on January 1, 1927. He received his A.B. (1947) and J.D. (1950) from Columbia University and immediately joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was an extremely effective and popular teacher for 22 years. In 1973, he became the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at Boalt Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, holding that position until his retirement in 2000. He continued to teach his uniquely demanding course on federal courts until 2007. He also regularly taught constitutional law during his years at Berkeley Law, and had earlier given courses on administrative law, legal process, and property at Pennsylvania.

 

Professor Mishkin strongly encouraged those in his classes to engage in close reading, rigorous analysis and precise articulation of their views, always prodding them to reexamine their thinking and recognize its limitations. His own approach combined, in an unusual mix, a subtle legal mind and a jurist’s probing search for principled rules of constitutional law, leavened by a pragmatic assessment of the proper role of the United States Supreme Court in our constitutional democracy. He took a special interest in many of his students and was often a powerful influence in guiding their careers. Dozens went on to clerkships in the federal courts and many became clerks on the Supreme Court because of his recommendations, to which the justices gave special credence. A large number of his students later went on to distinguished academic careers in their own right.

 

Early in his career, Professor Mishkin published a series of pathbreaking articles on foundational questions in the law of federal courts. These analyses remain authoritative today, more than 50 years after their publication. In addition, he was a coauthor of On Law in Courts as well as of the third edition of The Federal Courts and the Federal System, perhaps the most acclaimed casebook in American law. He also served on the U.S. Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. In 1975, he was on President Gerald Ford’s short list of Supreme Court nominees. He participated in a wide range of constitutional litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court, including acting as special counsel defending The Regents of the University of California in the landmark Bakke case in 1978, the first major decision on the constitutionality of affirmative action programs in higher education.

 

During a long and distinguished career, he was a visiting professor at Colorado, Duke, Michigan, and Texas Law Schools, as well as at Haverford College. He was on the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at Wolfson College, Cambridge University. He was a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

In 1996, Mishkin received the law school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. On October 27, 2006, dozens of the country’s leading scholars and practitioners of constitutional law and federal courts law gathered to honor Professor Mishkin at a conference devoted to examining his ideas and life’s work. Participants, many of whom had been Mishkin’s students, and all of whom had benefitted from his scholarship and professional leadership, joined in a broad look at multiple substantive and procedural aspects of federal courts law, from U.S. Supreme Court decision-making to class actions and protective jurisdiction. The papers prepared for the occasion were published in a symposium issue of the California Law Review dedicated to Mishkin’s work, 95 Calif. L. Rev. 1193-1820 (2007).

 

Paul Mishkin’s wife of 28 years, Milli, died in 2003. He is survived by his son, Jonathan Westover.

 

 

              Jesse H. Choper                                                                               2010

              Stephen McG. Bundy