William Cohen
William Cohen was a storied instructor of constitutional law, federal jurisdiction and torts at Stanford Law School from 1970 until his retirement in 1999. (Photo courtesy Stanford Law School)

In 1957, when Bill Cohen left his clerkship with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to begin his teaching career at the University of Minnesota Law School, he was just 24 years old. Two years later, when Bill left Minnesota for UCLA, he was only 26. Yet he soon would become the first graduate of the UCLA School of Law to join that school’s faculty. With such a heady start, Bill might have been forgiven had he taken on academic airs. Having spent his young adulthood teaching law, he might have adopted the strutting intellectualism and bloated jargon so common in our field. Yet throughout his half-century scholarly career, Bill Cohen remained in print and in the classroom the same man he was in person. The remarkable thing about Professor William Cohen’s scholarship is how much like Bill it sounded. There was nothing smug or self-important or embellished. He wrote simply and sparely except when making a joke. And his sharpest analytical weapon was his wit, which was charming and wry—and devastating—and very, very smart.

Sometimes Bill aimed his humor at himself. In his first published paper, a 1958 tribute to Justice Douglas, whom Bill revered, he rejected as “preposterous” the notion that Supreme Court law clerks shaped the law of the land. “My own suggestions” as a law clerk, Bill wrote, “would be considered and, more often than not, rejected when a few probing questions demonstrated their intellectual bankruptcy.” Justice Douglas rarely deigned to let Bill draft an opinion and when he did, Bill recalled, “The finished product might bear less than a family resemblance to my first efforts.”

In later years Bill turned his wit on the Supreme Court itself. In what may be his most influential paper, he chided the justices for failing to explain exactly where in the Constitution they had discovered the right of persons who move from state to state to claim welfare and other benefits in their newly adopted home states. “The constitutional law” in this realm, Bill wrote, “begins with Shapiro v. Thompson. So does the confusion.” The only praise he could muster for the justices was for having taken a seven-year pause from making new law in the area. During this “sabbatical,” Bill said, “Court watchers were spared the pain of reading one more case that . . . added one more layer of tar to the analytical highway.”

And sometimes Bill turned his wit ever so gently on us—his colleagues. Here at Stanford, where Bill joined the law faculty in 1970, he put out a wickedly funny satirical newspaper reporting on the faculty’s internal deliberations. In them Bill portrayed our wonderfully soft-hearted colleague, Barbara Babcock, as insisting that 90 percent of our students should receive top-10-percent grades; Joe Grundfest, JD ’78, who keeps a high public profile, as spewing Latin to The New York Times; Larry Lessig, a man of high ambitions, as plotting to conquer the globe; and all critical legal theorists as failing ever to finish a sentence.

And then there’s the classroom, where Bill’s wit and charm captured the affections of generations of law students. Bill was a fabled instructor of constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, and torts. His constitutional law casebook, co-authored most recently with Jonathan Varat and Vikram Amar and now in its 14th edition, has been the constitutional lodestar for tens of thousands of law students. One reviewer wrote of this casebook that he had “not yet seen a more complete book, one that is better written and more readable, as carefully planned and edited … and as student-friendly.”

In the last week or two I’ve reached out to a number of Bill’s students. Over and over they’ve told me of his gently teasing humor, directed often at students but never at their expense. And they’ve told me of his wizardry at the podium. One of Bill’s great prides was having taught NBA champion and basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton, who sent me a stunning testimonial to Bill’s influence as a teacher. “Bill Cohen,” he wrote, “was like a lonely prophet … standing on the horizon holding a light. … And every time we got close to where we thought we were going, he would move further away. Bill Cohen never gave us any answers; he simply showed us how to find them.” He taught with “kindness, decency, honor, humor, and passionate fairness. … He cherished showing us things that we did not know or believe, eventually turning all of us into pure evangelists for truth, knowledge, … compassion, and justice.” But “[a]s great as it was to be Professor Bill Cohen’s student,” Mr. Walton wrote, “it was infinitely better to be his friend … .”

As a friend I hope I might close with two personal notes. The first has to do with Bill and his life since his retirement from teaching in 1999. Bill did not want to retire. He wanted to keep teaching, but his Parkinson’s disease was relentless. Slowly, he lost the power of speech. And Bill loved to talk. Bill Walton wrote that Professor Cohen’s oratorical skills made him “a combination of Beethoven, John Barlow, and the Grateful Dead with their booming and crashing thunder.” But slowly Bill grew silent. Yet he never stopped trying to speak; he never stopped trying to opine on the latest battles before the Supreme Court. He never lost, so far as I could tell, his zest for life or his readiness to soldier on.

At Bill’s memorial service his family rector, the Reverend Terry Gleeson, described Bill’s last battle. “Bill was a great scholar, a great teacher, a great husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” Rev. Gleeson said, “but perhaps his greatest accomplishment was that nearly twenty years ago he came to a point in his life when he had to face an incontrovertible fact: that there was no cure for what ailed him, that he was not going to get better, that there were things he could not change and could not deny, that he was already set on an inexorable course that would progressively diminish every physical ability he possessed until there was nothing left … . For him, the last twenty years have been a series of farewells—to walking and teaching, to speech and mobility, … to telling stories and making us laugh.” And it “must be ranked among Bill’s greatest accomplishments, that faced with this staggering, disorienting re-ordering of his life, his relationships, his career, his ability to control and direct his future, he responded with such extraordinary grace and dignity.”

William Cohen, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Emeritus, died on April 11 at age 81. He joined the Stanford Law faculty in 1970, focusing his scholarship on constitutional law, federal jurisdiction and torts. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Mahoney Cohen, three daughters, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. SL

2 Responses to Professor William Cohen
  1. I fondly remember my namesake. A mutual friend once had a party for Bill Cohen and Bill Cohen. Occasionally, when I was with the Attorney General’s Office in the 1960s, I would get his mail. In private practice, when I opened my office some years later, I sent him an announcement on which I wrote: “grand opening special on name changes” He thought it was hilarious.
    He will indeed be sorely missed.

  2. Our class was either the first or second to have Professor Cohen, and we didn’t quite, or maybe just the classmates I was close to, didn’t quite know what to make of him. But I still remember him, and his self defacing humor. The story of his end of life journey is a road that few of us would be as courageous or strong to follow.

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