†Clark Byse

An old classmate has emailed me the obituary of Prof. Clark Byse, from whom I learned what little I know about the American law of contracts. Prof. Byse had a full and interesting and productive life before dying at the age of 95, so this news is not as sad as it might have been. Still, it is always at least a little sad when admirable people take their leave.

Prof. Byse's was my very first lecture on my very first day of US law school, and couldn't have been more different to law school in Germany. At a German university, a lecture -- Vorlesung -- is exactly that. The lecturer liest vor: reads something out in front of you. In America (and especially when Byse was at the podium), you're expected to have done all the reading in advance, and the "lecturer" explains nothing: he asks you to explain matters to him. This is called the "Socratic method", though critics will complain that it is neither Socratic nor a method. Whatever about the merits of that complaint in general, from Byse, at least, we did learn something. (That first day, for example, we learned that, if you are a doctor trying to persuade a father to let you try a new skin-graft technique on his boy's hand, never ever promise that the hand will be "good as new". You might be liable later if the boy, as a teenager, grows hair on his palm, and as we all know that is something very likely to happen to teenage boys.)

Byse was a slightly-built man who never raised his voice, yet students trembled in fear of him. Heaven help the unprepared student, because Byse wasn't about to. In one famous instance, he called upon a hapless student to state the facts of a case.

"Umm, I'm sorry," confessed the suddenly ashen-faced unfortunate, "I have to admit I haven't read it."

"That's OK," said Byse with terrifying calmness, opening his pocket watch and putting it on the podium in front of him. "Read it now. We have all the time in the world."

And so the doomed youth sat there for ten or fifteen interminable minutes, reading the appellate opinion with the weight of his classmates' 400 eyes upon him, damning the day he ever crawled forth from his mother's womb. One almost felt sorry for him. Indeed, I've met very senior lawyers who'd taken Byse's contracts course decades earlier, and still spoke of him with a tinge of fear in their voice.

And yet there was really no need for fear. To profit from Byse's lectures one really had to do only two things. First: read, and think about, the materials. But that goes without saying for any course, I'd say. Second: stop worrying about looking the fool. Under the Socratic method, you are never right (and if on occasion you are, the lecturer will change the facts so that you're suddenly wrong). Get past those two humps, and Byse would help you to an understanding of how contracts work, and why. I can't imagine how many thousands of students he helped over the years. We shall not see his like again.