Professor Welsh White

I've known for a little while that Professor Welsh White was fighting cancer--my friend George, the law librarian, mentioned it to me a couple of months ago--and so yesterday's news was saddening but not surprising. George's description of Professor White's demeanor during last semester was exactly as his obit writer put it: he was busy making plans for the future and speaking confidently about what things would be like once cancer was behind him.

Professor White taught me three times during law school. The first two times were Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, a couple of first-year staples that were foisted on me, course and instructor, by sectional scheduling. (He has the distinction, I think, of giving me my only non-A first year grades.) More importantly, when given the ability later on to decide where to spend my electives, I signed on to his Evidence class without hesitation. I wanted to spend more time being taught by him.

As an educational experience, the first year of law school by and large lives up to the hype that surrounds it. Or at least it did for me. Then and now, I loved it all. The standardized curriculum--the same everywhere since time immemorial (or at least the last 125 years), those bold red casebooks filled with odd and off-putting monoliths which would only "yield their kernel up slowly and painfully," the suffocating insularity of spending an academic year with the same eighty-five people and the vacillations between thrill and terror, often within the same fifty minutes: all of it. I wouldn't change much, if anything, of it.

Nearly all of my professors that first year were fantastic, but two went out of their way to make us feel unusually human. One opened her house to us on a Friday night, and Professor White encouraged us all to sign up in groups of three for lunch with him at Hemingway's Cafe, across the street from the law school. I think he picked up the check.

I had liked his class quite a bit, but he was even better in a small group. He had started out as an Assistant D.A. when Arlen Specter was Philly's D.A., but he dropped it after a few years to go into teaching. It was clearly a good move for him, as he had a personality that was better suited to academia than to private practice. Among lawyers, that sort of statement might be read reflexively as a criticism, but I couldn't mean it more complimentarily. The most intellectually circumspect and thoughtful lawyers often aren't well-suited to the sort of advocacy that characterizes modern law. Sometimes they have difficulty faking the aggression and certitude that are so essential to projecting confidence, and so at odds with the sort of detached but introspective appreciation for competing viewpoints. Professor White was a first-rate scholar, and I'll never forget how he set me at ease during that lunch. It was comforting to know that he cared enough about how we were doing to give up his lunch hour.

Professor White's Evidence class was an advanced elective, and by that point in law school part-time employment or full-time worrying about employment had turned most of us indifferent or hostile to preparing for class. Rather than making us all dread being caught in our unpreparedness, Professor White resorted to going straight down the rows to get answers to questions, which allowed the unhappy few advance notice to read the cases. On one afternoon early in the semester his queries fell on a particularly loathsome student who responded, too happily, "Pass." Professor White, politely enough, said that he'd give him a pass for that day, but he would be back to him again. The bastard replied, "Well, then I pass for that time, too." We were aghast. Professor White was on the short list of least confrontational law professors on the faculty. He never used his position or his knowledge to intimidate or for self-aggrandizement. Sure, few of us were enthusiastic about keeping up with the reading, but a certain standard of conduct had been breached under any circumstances, and all the worse because it was Professor White.

Needless to say, I was curious to see how the next class would unfold. Would the guy show up? Would Professor White go back to him? The bell rang. Class began. Professor White went right to him and the guy had blinked and read. He answered the questions. Order was restored. Nice guys finish first.

God bless you, Professor.