Legal scholar Ronald Rotunda, whose course book on constitutional law greeted thousands of law school students over the last three decades, died suddenly of pneumonia at a hospital last week. He was 73.

Rotunda, the Doy & Dee Henley Chair and distinguished professor of jurisprudence at Chapman University, Dale E. Fowler School of Law, was also an expert on legal ethics and has been credited with helping establish professional ethics as a discipline to be taught and studied at law schools.

“Professor Rotunda had an extraordinary legal career and was a prolific and well-respected scholar and a beloved colleague and professor,” a tweet from Chapman University on March 15 stated. “His passing is a tremendous loss for Chapman, the legal academy, and the legal profession.”

Former Richard Nixon White House counsel John Dean wrote, “It is difficult to believe this brilliant dynamo of legal scholarship, wonderful erudition, and wily wit is gone. But his impact will remain, and it will affect all practicing American lawyers, if not more, for untold decades.” In 1973, Rotunda worked for the Senate Watergate Committee, which spurred his interest in legal ethics.

In a December 2017 interview with Careerist columnist Vivia Chen after Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was accused of improper behavior with female law clerks, Rotunda proposed that Congress extend sexual harassment laws to cover the federal judiciary. “Then court clerks and other employees can sue the judge personally for sex harassment. If judges have to pay money damages out of their own pockets that would get their attention.”

Generally conservative in his philosophy, Rotunda was a colorful and engaging character, wearing eye-catching bow ties and driving a vintage Rolls-Royce. “But beneath the show was a serious scholar of immense erudition,” said Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute, where Rotunda was a visiting and senior fellow.

Before moving to Chapman, Rotunda taught at the University of Illinois and then at George Mason University School of Law, now called Antonin Scalia Law School.

Blogger and scholar Josh Blackman, who was a student and then friend of Rotunda at George Mason, recalled, “Twelve years ago, I walked into law school absolutely clueless. I had never taken a class in constitutional law and could not tell you what the acronym SCOTUS meant. That cluelessness changed when I entered Ronald Rotunda's ConLaw I class. I was immediately hooked. Ron, as I would come to know him, was able to seamlessly blend probing questions, compelling lectures, and uproarious humor.”

Rotunda counted Antonin Scalia as a fellow Italian-American friend, he wrote in a tribute after Scalia died in 2016. “As for those who hate him—well, the only way to avoid the hate of some people is to leave no footprints. Nino left many footprints.”

Rotunda was a prolific and felicitous writer. Just last month, his new book “John Marshall and the Cases that United the States of America” was published to critical acclaim. It condensed the classic four-volume Albert Beveridge biography of John Marshall, and according to Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet, Rotunda “has done the public a great service in making accessible to contemporary readers an abridgement of Albert Beveridge's wonderful book on Chief Justice John Marshall.”