Those inside and outside the legal academy are still coming
to terms with the sudden and tragic loss of Florida State University law
professor Dan Markel, who was shot and killed at his Tallahassee home on
Friday. Dan touched the lives of
hundreds of students and colleagues. I
was fortunate to know him since law school, and wanted to share some
(admittedly scattered) memories of a friend lost too soon.
Even as a 1L, when most of us felt uncertain and trembling
about our career decisions (or even just making it through the next class), Dan
carried a certain unusual confidence. In
criminal law, he argued in favor of sending people to “virtue schools.” He lugged his old Macintosh laptop to all
classes, dragging the plug carefully across the floor behind his classmates’
chairs. On Saturday afternoons after
synagogue, he was known to offer friends a mean vegetarian chopped liver. He was a character, and a sincere one.
I lost daily contact with Dan after we graduated in 2000,
but he resurfaced in my consciousness one day in 2005, when he launched Prawfsblawg. I was in private practice and enjoying it,
but reading the academic posts by Dan and his friends added a powerful new
dimension to the legal issues I was contemplating. I wanted to be part of it. An in 2009, when I finally decided to break
into the legal academy, Dan warmly and cheerfully facilitated my introduction
to colleagues far and wide. He reviewed
my early scholarship. Even though I
wrote in civil procedure and he in criminal law, he connected me to the right
people almost effortlessly. Later, after
I joined the New England Law faculty, he encouraged me to guest blog at Prawfs,
which I have done and enjoyed on more than one occasion.
It is remarkable that someone would do so much to help an old
classmate who had been out of sight and out of mind for almost a decade. But that was just Dan being Dan. The outpouring of grief at his loss on
Facebook and Prawfsblawg is a testament to how many lives he touched. He was taken too young, and we will miss him
greatly. Baruch Dayan Emet.
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