"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.

Hugh wanted us to savor his quotes—and especially the provocative phrases. One day in the hallway he pulled me over. "What do you call an Associate Dean," he asked. "A mouse who wants to be a rat." Language was meant to destabilize, to shift the ground underneath our feet. A conversation with Hugh was an uncanny mix of Socratic Method with fisherman's yarn.

Famously, he often asked faculty position candidates what they were reading. It was remarkable how few of them had something interesting to say in response. I recall a conversation he began with me about Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, a magisterial study of vibrant lay Catholicism in pre-Reformation England. Lawyers, Hugh believed, should be ready to discuss anything. While Hugh would call our enterprise "the life of the mind," he had an uneasy relationship with theory. Yale was the place that did Meta. Our goal was practical wisdom. This may explain his preference for historians over philosophers.

Hugh's relationship to power was complex. On one hand, he was a natural rebel. He lacked patience with arcane educational accreditation rules and enjoyed pricking the pompous until they burst. Hugh's idea of being a Dean was to assume the worries of day-to-day management so the faculty would be insulated from the university bureaucracy. Yet he expected both dean and faculty to be creative, inventive, and audacious. Paraphrasing Victorian politician Lord Salisbury, he argued that institutions are assembled through a large number of incremental improvements. A law school that stood still in a changing world, Hugh believed, would sooner or later fall prey to Darwin.

We had to be local and global, well-grounded in a broad culture and committed to professional practice, rebellious and understand that power is to be respected and directed. With our small size and lean budgets, we had to be nimble. Hugh was a non-writing scholar—and so selecting the right colleagues, much as a wine collector identifies vintages, was a matter of particular pride. My predecessors in legal history, Bruce Mann and Philip Hamburger went on to assume posts at Harvard and Columbia. We hired with his urging Olympiad Ioffe, a renowned Russian émigré Roman law scholar who was supported through a temporary fellowship at Harvard—hardly the typical addition to a small public law school. Hugh's roster of remarkable faculty draft picks was his particular accomplishment. Hugh expected us to adopt his ambition. It was up to us, like lighting fires in the classroom, to figure out its form.

Hugh has been credited with engineering the move to our collegiate Gothic campus—which has been described as one of the most beautiful in the country. Yet his real accomplishment was ensuring that its formidable stone turrets were not surrounded by a moat. He was committed to the local community and sought ways to make the Law School relevant to a diverse constituency through such enterprises as the Connecticut Urban Legal Initiative. In his early years, Hugh was a foot soldier in the War on Poverty. He provided legal assistance to tenants in East Baltimore, often people of color, threatened with eviction. Only a few provisions in the housing code and a band of poorly paid public interest lawyers made the difference between people having a roof over their heads or being out on the street.

This experience shaped an abiding conviction that the rule of law is a core value. Despite Hugh's irrepressible irreverence, his sense of social justice rested firmly on the notion that law is ultimately all we have to protect us from the raw imposition of power. It serves as a scarecrow to keep at bay abusive landlords, employers, and bureaucrats. As a young undergraduate at Yale, Hugh read for nearly a year Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. He was enamored by the quote that "Without the power of law, ravens scatter across the fields." Hugh, who was fluent in Chinese and Russian, would surely have recited it in its original language—though he may well not have taken the trouble to drop a footnote.

Steven Wilf is the Anthony J. Smits Professor of Global Commerce at the University of Connecticut School of Law.