“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” This was the advice Hugh Macgill gave me when I was invited to join the faculty of the Law School of the University of Connecticut at the very end of his deanship. His suggestion was on point—even more so in an information age when abundant knowledge is easily accessible and sparks are in short supply. Hugh did not mention that the quote was from Yeats (He quoted frequently and cited rarely). Nor did he elaborate the details. The how-to was my business.

Hugh’s death last month at the age of 79 was an immense loss for his colleagues, friends and Connecticut’s legal profession. He has been praised as an institution builder. Those who knew him well remembered another side: his irreverence, audacity and irritation with nonsense. But mostly, as I believe he would have admitted, Hugh was a connoisseur. He collected quotes and stories, books, and—his greatest pride—faculty colleagues who he hired with the nose of an oenophile sniffing among the open bottles.

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