In Memoriam
Justin Sweet
Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, Emeritus
UC Berkeley
1929-2020
Professor Emeritus Justin Sweet was born in Madison, WI, on October 7, 1929, and passed away on May 5, 2020, in Santa Cruz, CA. Sweet was born and raised in Madison and received his B.A. (1951) and LL.B. (1953) at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied contracts and legal history with the noted legal historian, Willard Hurst. After graduation he worked in the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office and then served in the U.S. Army as a defense attorney in the Judge-Advocate General’s Corps. He then practiced law in Milwaukee until 1958, when he accepted an offer to join the University of California, Berkeley law faculty.
At Berkeley, Professor Sweet taught contracts, insurance law, and construction law until his retirement in 1996. He was the author of two innovative casebooks: Legal Aspects of Architecture, Engineering and the Construction Process, which went through nine editions; and Construction Industry Contracts, as well as, Selected Problems of Construction Law: International Approach (with Peter Gauch). Although standard contracts casebooks usually have a handful of construction contract cases, Sweet’s innovation was to focus on construction law contracts because such transactions span long periods of time, involve many parties, and are subject to a host of contingencies, unanticipated disruptions, and third-party interventions, all of which are drenched with factual uncertainty. Such contracts also inject international considerations, which further complicate matters. These works remain a “must read” not only for students of construction law, but for practicing lawyers, mediators, and also engineers and architects, who regularly report that Sweet's insights and analysis help them avoid a great many expensive headaches. Moreover, they served as the basis for a new law school (and architecture school) course that is now regularly offered in dozens of law schools across the country and abroad, and a new field and bar specialization, construction law. Their success led Justin to begin a long-term teaching arrangement with the Department of Architecture at Berkeley, and a long-term collaboration with Professor Peter Gauch of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Sweet and Gauch organized annual international construction law conferences that continued for 20 years or longer, and were attended by leading construction law practitioners, and international arbitrators. In 2009, the American Bar Association published a collection of Professor Sweet’s writings on construction law. In her Foreword to the collection, noted construction law expert and arbitrator, Deborah Ballati, wrote that “[Sweet has] created the discipline of construction law as a subject to be taught in law schools, and has nurtured and nourished [this field] ever since.”
Professor Sweet is also well-known in the legal academy for his fascinating study of the work of the American Law Institute (ALI), an organization consisting of practicing lawyers, judges, and academic lawyers, whose primary task is to “restate” the law. These Restatements are relied upon by courts, lawyers, and academics as authoritative summaries of the law in important areas, such as Contracts, Torts, and Conflict of Laws. However, his participant-observation study treated the ALI as a sort of private legislature which made law, complete with parties, factions, interest groups, important committees and subcommittees, and with lobbyists in the corridors ready to offer language for drafts and take members to dinner. Sweet’s analysis brought a great deal of clarity to the important and influential work of the ALI.
Retirement did not suit Professor Sweet. Between 1999 and 2005, Justin and Sheba, his wife of 44 years, moved to Jerusalem full-time. In Jerusalem, he joined a celebrated Talmud study group led by Adin Steinsaltz at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and began a second teaching career, regularly teaching Contracts at the Faculty of Law at Netanya Academic College. In 2005, Professor Sweet returned to Berkeley Law, where he reclaimed his faculty retirement office and kept busy working on a new edition of his Architecture casebook. He also resumed his active engagement with Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley, which had been a central part of his life since the 1970s. By the time the Sweets returned to Berkeley, probably 75 percent or more of the Berkeley Law faculty had been appointed since Sweet’s retirement, so by then only a handful of the current faculty knew him. But many of the newer faculty recalled a slightly built man with a beard and a black kippah popping up now and then walking rapidly down the hall to his office or sipping coffee in the cafe. He was gregarious, and often took younger faculty under his wing, and recounted various changes he had witnessed in the law school over his career, including the significantly increased size of the faculty, noting that in his early years “it was like family; we met in the Faculty Lounge.” Professor Sweet was particularly proud of the Law School’s appointment of so many emigre scholars between the late 1930s the mid-1950s, and how their presence transformed Berkeley Law, and American legal scholarship more generally.
An inveterate traveler, in addition to his years at Berkeley, Sweet was also a visiting professor at a number of law schools around the world, including the University of Rome, Hebrew University, the University of Leuven, the University of Toronto, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Fribourg, and Singapore National University. Justin is survived by his second wife of 44 years, Sheba Sweet, his children, Lisa Sweet Dilles, Jonathan Sweet, and Sharon Sweet, all of whom live in the Santa Cruz area, and Allegra Cohen (Sheba’s daughter, whom Justin adopted) of Efrat, Israel.
Malcolm M. Feeley
2020
At Berkeley, Professor Sweet taught contracts, insurance law, and construction law until his retirement in 1996. He was the author of two innovative casebooks: Legal Aspects of Architecture, Engineering and the Construction Process, which went through nine editions; and Construction Industry Contracts, as well as, Selected Problems of Construction Law: International Approach (with Peter Gauch). Although standard contracts casebooks usually have a handful of construction contract cases, Sweet’s innovation was to focus on construction law contracts because such transactions span long periods of time, involve many parties, and are subject to a host of contingencies, unanticipated disruptions, and third-party interventions, all of which are drenched with factual uncertainty. Such contracts also inject international considerations, which further complicate matters. These works remain a “must read” not only for students of construction law, but for practicing lawyers, mediators, and also engineers and architects, who regularly report that Sweet's insights and analysis help them avoid a great many expensive headaches. Moreover, they served as the basis for a new law school (and architecture school) course that is now regularly offered in dozens of law schools across the country and abroad, and a new field and bar specialization, construction law. Their success led Justin to begin a long-term teaching arrangement with the Department of Architecture at Berkeley, and a long-term collaboration with Professor Peter Gauch of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Sweet and Gauch organized annual international construction law conferences that continued for 20 years or longer, and were attended by leading construction law practitioners, and international arbitrators. In 2009, the American Bar Association published a collection of Professor Sweet’s writings on construction law. In her Foreword to the collection, noted construction law expert and arbitrator, Deborah Ballati, wrote that “[Sweet has] created the discipline of construction law as a subject to be taught in law schools, and has nurtured and nourished [this field] ever since.”
Professor Sweet is also well-known in the legal academy for his fascinating study of the work of the American Law Institute (ALI), an organization consisting of practicing lawyers, judges, and academic lawyers, whose primary task is to “restate” the law. These Restatements are relied upon by courts, lawyers, and academics as authoritative summaries of the law in important areas, such as Contracts, Torts, and Conflict of Laws. However, his participant-observation study treated the ALI as a sort of private legislature which made law, complete with parties, factions, interest groups, important committees and subcommittees, and with lobbyists in the corridors ready to offer language for drafts and take members to dinner. Sweet’s analysis brought a great deal of clarity to the important and influential work of the ALI.
Retirement did not suit Professor Sweet. Between 1999 and 2005, Justin and Sheba, his wife of 44 years, moved to Jerusalem full-time. In Jerusalem, he joined a celebrated Talmud study group led by Adin Steinsaltz at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and began a second teaching career, regularly teaching Contracts at the Faculty of Law at Netanya Academic College. In 2005, Professor Sweet returned to Berkeley Law, where he reclaimed his faculty retirement office and kept busy working on a new edition of his Architecture casebook. He also resumed his active engagement with Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley, which had been a central part of his life since the 1970s. By the time the Sweets returned to Berkeley, probably 75 percent or more of the Berkeley Law faculty had been appointed since Sweet’s retirement, so by then only a handful of the current faculty knew him. But many of the newer faculty recalled a slightly built man with a beard and a black kippah popping up now and then walking rapidly down the hall to his office or sipping coffee in the cafe. He was gregarious, and often took younger faculty under his wing, and recounted various changes he had witnessed in the law school over his career, including the significantly increased size of the faculty, noting that in his early years “it was like family; we met in the Faculty Lounge.” Professor Sweet was particularly proud of the Law School’s appointment of so many emigre scholars between the late 1930s the mid-1950s, and how their presence transformed Berkeley Law, and American legal scholarship more generally.
An inveterate traveler, in addition to his years at Berkeley, Sweet was also a visiting professor at a number of law schools around the world, including the University of Rome, Hebrew University, the University of Leuven, the University of Toronto, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Fribourg, and Singapore National University. Justin is survived by his second wife of 44 years, Sheba Sweet, his children, Lisa Sweet Dilles, Jonathan Sweet, and Sharon Sweet, all of whom live in the Santa Cruz area, and Allegra Cohen (Sheba’s daughter, whom Justin adopted) of Efrat, Israel.
Malcolm M. Feeley
2020
