Geoffrey Hazard

Professor Geoffrey Hazard died on Jan. 10. Many of us knew him as the director of the American Law Institute between 1984 and 1999. Others had him as their teacher or teaching colleague. He taught law at Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California-Berkeley and Hastings College Law. Anyone in the legal community who knew him in any capacity was truly impressed by his scholarship, intellect and ability to communicate and explain difficult legal principles.

Hazard also was practical and able to diffuse arguments at ALI meetings and in developing consensus on Restatement principles while director of the ALI and draftsman of the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct promulgated in 1972, Restatement Second of Judgments published in 1982 and Reporter of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct promulgated in 1983. His knowledge of diverse subjects is illustrated by the fact he served as dean of the Yale School of Management and executive director of the American Bar Foundation earlier in his career.

While a respected teacher of trial practice and civil procedure, and one of the authors of a leading treatise on civil procedure now in its fifth edition, he is best known as the premier teacher and writer on legal ethics, professionalism and the law governing lawyers. We have all taken courses on professional responsibility in law school and now must take an ethics component of mandatory continuing legal education. And we do because Professor Hazard pressed to have the subject as part of the core curriculum in legal education and moved the legal community to realize the subject needed attention and that its complexity warranted attention.