On Guido Calabresi

Few individuals have had as long and as influential a career in law as Guido Calabresi. Cofounder of the field of law and economics, teacher, dean, and judge, he has inspired (and infuriated) multitudes. On the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where he has served for thirty years (while continuing to teach until recently), his creativity and doctrinal innovations continue apace. He has urged the academy, legislature, and bench alike to engage in continuing conversation to improve the law and its effect upon those to whom it acts. One of these areas is certification—the practice of referring state law questions to the highest court of the state whose law is involved—in which he became the national leader. He came to all this through a unique perspective, that of a refugee from Italian fascism, which he considers “the most important part of my education”: “Being an outsider shaped me, it made me more empathetic.” As he has noted, “It is said that Italians love to talk, to communicate with everybody.” Certainly no one who has met Guido will dispute that or that he does so with a rare warmth. He also epitomized one institution in a singular way. From a student who helped run the institution’s law journal while at the same time teaching economics to undergraduates before becoming perhaps Justice Hugo L. Black’s best law clerk to a scholar who taught torts with unabated enthusiasm, not to mention provocation, for more than sixty years, and finally to the dean who built the contemporary Yale Law School—he caught its spirit in a way that no one else has. However hard that is to define or capture, Guido, as he is universally known, embodied it. The recent publication of his oral history, appropriately titled Outside In, affords an appropriate opportunity for this examination of his extraordinary life and career.