Professor Geoffrey Hazard was a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1964 to 1971. We mourn his loss along with our colleagues at the law schools at the University of California at Berkeley, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Hastings, all of which had the pleasure of having this extraordinary teacher and scholar on their faculty as well. Below is an excerpt from the obituary posted by the University of Pennsylvania, which can be read in full here. 

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Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, died on January 11, 2018, at the age of 88.

Hazard served as Trustee Professor of Law at Penn Law for 15 years, from 1994 to 2009, and he was a leading figure in the fields of civil procedure, judicial administration, and legal ethics. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn Law, he was a law professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, though he continued to regularly teach courses on advanced federal procedure at Penn Law.

“Professor Hazard was a true giant in American law,” said Ted Ruger, Dean of the Law School and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law. “In addition to making a lasting impact on the fields of civil procedure and legal ethics, he was an eminent member of the Penn Law community and the broader legal academy and a devoted teacher and mentor. He will be deeply missed.”

“Geoff Hazard was a gifted scholar, teacher, institutional leader, and citizen,” said Stephen B. Burbank, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice. “A lawyer of immense and various talents and interests, he was as comfortable excavating the etiology of complex procedural doctrines as he was negotiating the drafting compromises necessary to achieve consensus on court rules or legislation.”

Burbank added: “Geoff was a true public intellectual, a supremely effective pragmatist who preferred a life of active involvement to the leisure of the theory class. Rarely has a single lawyer achieved such distinction in so many roles, and rarely has the administration of justice had such an incisive and knowledgeable champion working for its benefit in so many ways. I was proud to have Geoff as a colleague. He will always be my mentor and friend.”

Hazard coauthored leading treatises and casebooks on civil procedure – Civil Procedure (6th ed. forthcoming 2018, with John Leubsdorf & Debra Lyn Bassett); Pleading and Procedure: Cases and Materials (11th ed. 2015, with William A. Fletcher, Stephen McG. Bundy, & Andrew D. Bradt) – and professional ethics – The Law of Lawyering (4th ed. 2015, with W. William Hodes & Peter R. Jarvis); The Law and Ethics of Lawyering (6th ed. 2017, with Susan P. Koniak, Roger C. Cramton, George M. Cohen, & W. Bradley Wendel). His other writings spanned a broad range of topics, including civil procedure for international commercial disputes; joinder, including class actions and discovery; and legal ethics, particularly comparing the ethics practices of lawyers in modern industrialized nations.

Read more at the original publication