Daggett discovered higher ed, world in senior life

Olive Daggett, 1927-2023
Legacy.com

Olive Daggett died on December 21, 2023, at the age of 96.

Olive was a friend, a leader in my church, and an astounding human being. Her passing was marked at Legacy.com and by The Providence Journal. Her memorial service last weekend at Barrington Baptist Church in Rhode Island is posted at Vimeo.

I memorialize Olive here at The Savory Tort because she was inspiriting in ways especially relevant to my personal and professional interests in education and internationalism.

For 40 years, Olive had a full life and worked a career in accounting for AT&T in New Jersey. Yet she had another life ahead, even before the eternal one. After retiring, she moved to Rhode Island. And then she enrolled at the University of Rhode Island and earned a four-year bachelor's degree.

Moreover, in the course of her university studies, as a senior, Olive studied abroad. She discovered a love for the world, twice studying in England and traveling on the continent. At Barrington Baptist Church, Olive gravitated to foreign missions. She became the church's missions secretary and coordinated missionary efforts globally for decades.

Faintly visible in the ProJo photograph, a pink- or purple-dyed streak ran through Olive's silver hair. Pastor Scotty Neasbitt recounted that Olive adopted the color in part to help her relate to youth in the church. Either it worked or she never needed any help; she was adored by all ages. Something about her genial character and zest for life made her transcendent of generations.

My wife and I were fortunate to have been able to visit with Olive when she was in hospice care in December. She was her usual jovial self. Secure in her faith, she had no fear of her mortal end. In so many ways, she was, and for all who remember her will remain, an inspiration.

Professor Marshall Shapo leaves extraordinary legacy

Marshall S. Shapo
Northwestern photo by Jasmin Shah

Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha'olam, dayan ha-emet. 

A luminary in American legal education, a brilliant scholar in torts, and a dear mentor and friend, Professor Emeritus Marshall S. Shapo died Friday, at 87, in Chicagoland.

A professor at Northwestern University Law School for more than 40 years, most of his more-than-half-century academic career, Shapo was a prolific scholar and award-winning authority on torts and product liability law. In his books, articles, and teaching, Shapo saw tort law as inextricable from culture, politics, and society. Accordingly, he approached his subject matter holistically, embracing historical, economic, and critical perspectives as all essential, and none alone definitive, to understand the law.

It was that breadth of perspective that prompted me to adopt the second edition of Shapo's Tort and Injury Law as my textbook when I started teaching torts 20 years ago, in 2003. Reflective of Shapo's versatility of mind and insatiable curiosity, his pedagogy challenged students at once with writings in ancient philosophy and religion, and with theories of economics and feminism. References to the Torah appeared alongside excerpts from research in the latest interdisciplinary social science.

I reached out to Marshall in 2003 for guidance in using his book; I did not then suspect that he would become my extraordinary mentor. I was privileged to join Tort and Injury Law as a co-author for the third edition in 2006. My teaching today in torts, and in Tortz, is and forever will be a product of Shapo's worldview. His teaching lives on in my career and classes, and no doubt in the practices and lives of his generations of students and mentees, and theirs in turn.

Yet Tort and Injury Law was a only small part of Marshall's importance to me. Of incalculable value were his insights into academic life, his counsel, especially in times of hardship, and, so often, simply his enduring friendship. As relentlessly busy and productive as he always was, he called me periodically with no agenda, just to check in. However much I wished not to burden him with mundane ups and downs, he somehow, with the skill of a seasoned counselor, elicited my confessions. His humility and wisdom were invariably comforting. Never was there a frustration—a discontented student, a shortsighted colleague—that Shapo had not faced and hurdled already in his career: evidence that I, too, could land well on the other side.

Shapo above else modeled balance of work and life. His obituary honors his surviving wife, Helene—also an inspiring and renowned legal educator—sons, Benjamin and Nathaniel; and six grandchildren and great-grandson.

Appropriately, Shapo's family led off the obituary, before any mention of his career. Marshall himself placed his wife and sons at the top of his CV. Never did I have a catch-up conversation with Marshall in which he did not update me on their well-being. When speaking of grandchildren, he radiated with a joy that not even product liability litigation could evoke. All of his accomplishments and honors as a lawyer and educator meant nothing to him in comparison with his devotion to family.

Marshall, rest in peace.

The Shapo family invites memorial contributions to the American Parkinson's Disease Association, P.O. Box 61420, Staten Island, N.Y. 10306.

RIP Andrew Jennings, legendary investigative sport reporter who exposed corruption in FIFA, IOC

Andrew Jennings testifies in a Brazilian legislative probe  of the national football
federation (photo by Waldemir Barreto/Agência Senado CC BY 2.0).

A pause today to take stock of the work of investigative reporter and anti-corruption advocate Andrew Jennings, publisher of Transparency in Sport, who died on January 8.

Jennings was a tireless and cantankerous thorn in the side of Big Sport.  It would be difficult to overstate the role he played in precipitating the sea-changing revelations of corruption in the administration of the Olympics and international football.  He broke new ground with his books, The Lord of the Rings (1992) and Foul! The Secret World of FIFA (2006).  The "fall of the house of FIFA" and boss Sepp Blatter in the 2015 corruption scandal probably would not have happened had Jennings not sewed the seeds a decade earlier.

Jennings was a prolific writer across media, his many books besides.  Notwithstanding a more-than-fair share of earned global acclaim and enmity, Jennings also was a tirelessly supportive colleague in his crusade.  Email to his blog's contact address went directly to him; he personally and kindly answered a query of mine when I was researching on sport accountability.  He penned a foreword and praise for Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way, the book (reviewed) by Australian whistleblower (and friend of The Savory Tort) Bonita Mersiades.

Andrew Jennings has been widely memorialized, e.g., Sports Illustrated. His death leaves a gaping hole in the agencies of accountability for the quasi-corporate behemoths of transnational sport.  But his work has shown the world irrevocably that corruption thrives in the dark soil of secrecy.

RIP Russ Kick, eccentric FOIA champion

With images obtained under the federal FOIA, Russ Kick's "Memory Hole"

catalyzed conversation on the Iraq war. Now archived at the Library of Congress.

The transparency community lost an eccentric hero in September: Russ Kick died at his home in Tucson, Arizona, at age 52.

Kick's passing has been reported in many forums, and he was well remembered by The Washington Post and Seven Stories Press last week.  Nevertheless, I feel bound to add my own recognition of the loss.  A self-described "rogue transparency activist," Kick was a legend in the access community.  I knew him only through email exchanges.  I remember him as consistently eager and obliging at the prospect of rallying a recruit to any one of his many causes.

I'm sorry that the Post obit, by Harrison Smith, is paywalled, because it's a thorough and deserved tribute to a remarkable person who embodied the term "citizen-activist" long before it was fashionable.  Kick was a "FOIA frequent flier" who used the "spear" of access law, as Senator Patrick Leahy recently described the federal FOIA, to investigate the many causes that stirred him, from chemical warfare to animal welfare.

Kick had some real wins, too.  His 2004 publication of photos of coffins returning from the Iraq war stimulated vital public discussions about access, privacy, and, of course most importantly, the war itself.  The Defense Department said the photos were released mistakenly.  Vibrant discussions in my FOI class were fueled by those photos and by other content that Kick collected at his Memory Hole website (archived).  Kick's many and varied collection of FOIA prizes persists, for the time being, at The Memory Hole 2 and its "sister site," AltGov2.

Kick edited "The Graphic Canon."

I don't want to be too narrow in my recollection, nor to whitewash Kick's sometimes bawdy tastes and conspiracy-minded inclinations.  His eclectic libraries of content rescued from digital deletion ranged beyond government records to, as the Post summarized, "classic literature, erotica, food and ancient meditation practices."  His literary talents generated a bibliography of the intriguing and bizarre, including a "disinformation" series that touted conspiratorial revelations on governments and sex.  Meanwhile, he edited stunningly artful representations of classic literature in graphic novelizations.

It would be easy to write off Russ Kick as a quaint sort of crackpot.  The Post quoted Kick aptly describing himself: "'I can't focus completely on any one thing for too long,' he wrote in an online biography. 'My personal brand is a mess.'"

Yet with such volume of productivity in so many veins, with real impact that moved the needle to put the demos back into democracy, there was undeniably genius in the madness.  Russ Kick left the world better off than he found it for what he contributed.  Any of us should be so blessed to have the same said of us when we're gone.

RIP Hollis Joslin, JD '14, attorney, pilot, novelist

I'm heartbroken to report the sudden death of a dear friend, attorney, and alumnus, Hollis Gordon Joslin, JD '14, at age 56.

A husband, father, and grandfather, Hollis was a real-life "Renaissance man."  Besides lawyer, he was an auto mechanic, entrepreneur, licensed pilot, outdoorsman, poet, musician, and novelist.  In law, he practiced in bankruptcy and personal injury.  He made a series of funny ads for his practice, but also a serious one.  Owing to popular skepticism of lawyers, a viewer might misinterpret his serious ad as saccharine, but I can say from knowing Hollis, and knowing his Christian faith, that his down-home expression of compassion for would-be clients is purely genuine.

Hollis came to formal higher education only later in life, finishing his bachelor's in 2010.  In the finest tradition of a non-traditional student in law school, he was respected and adored by youthful classmates, whom he mentored generously with gentle and humble wisdom.  If formally a student in my torts classes, he was foremost a teacher to me, too.  He thought deeply about philosophy, economics, and politics, and was eager for a discussion partner to test out revelations.  I obliged to my own benefit.

One auspicious fruit of Hollis's deep thinking—I like to imagine forged at least in part by our conversations, but I probably self-aggrandize—was a clever novel that he conceived of as a contemporary revision of Randian objectivism, incorporating his own ideas.  Like me, Hollis subscribed to laissez-faire regulatory policy in principle, embodying the libertarian impulses of his native Texas.  But he also was deeply troubled by the prospect of corporatocracy.  Here is a précis of the book, "Citizens United":

If, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, the political speech of a corporation is no less protected by the First Amendment than that of natural persons, then the First Amendment implies a right for corporations to speak from elected office. That is the theory Vizion Inc. proposed to justify the corporation's candidacy for president of the United States: a less than remarkable development in a dystopian world dominated by the Global Trade Partnership. But the new Republic of Texas is having none of it. Flourishing under a policy of liberty and individual empowerment, Texas is all that stands between freedom and the tyranny of a corporate new world order. 

Hollis had an exciting video trailer made for the book.

I had always intended to write something about Citizens United (the book) here at The Savory Tort, but Hollis had asked me to wait until he devised a sort of "grand premiere."  I think that ambition fell by the wayside as he dove into law practice, and, I admit, I never followed up.

Hollis is survived by his lovely and loving wife, Dr. Cheryl Wathier, a kind and patient soul the likes of which a Renaissance man needs in a partner.  I was privileged to visit Hollis and Cheryl once in Arizona, and I never imagined that would be the last time I would see him.  Now I pray for strength for Cheryl and the kids.  In memory of Hollis, the family asked for donations to St. Jude's Children's Hospital.  My thanks to Justin Kadich, '14, for apprising me of the sad news.

In memoriam: Cassandra M. Langtry, JD class of '23

I'm saddened to share news of the passing of Cassie Langtry, a law student in my fall 2019 Torts I class, on January 15.   

An obituary recounting a full and generous life is posted at the Luzerne, Pennsylvania, funeral home, along with tributes and memories from friends and loved ones, including her law school classmates.  I knew of Cassie's affection for dogs, and the obituary remembers her love for her Comet and Scout.  She also liked reading and kayaking, so our hobbies overlapped quite a bit.  I did not know of her devotion to faith, but I am not surprised to learn that she served with World Challenge in Ecuador and instructed youth at her church in West Harwich, Massachusetts.  

In lieu of flowers or gifts to honor and remember Cassie, donations are sought for the Best Friends Animal Society, an organization dedicated to the protection and rescue of animals.

Cassie passed on the same day as a death in my family, of Gloria Buzi.  Gloria was a generous soul who relished retirement on Maryland's eastern shore.  A great many years of age separated Gloria from 24-year-old Cassie.  The difference might tempt one to a bitterness over lost potential, but I think it rather an occasion to recognize the distinctive gift and ultimately unknowable reverberations of every life.

Mass. Chief Justice Ralph Gants dies

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants has died.

Read more:
• NECN
• Boston Globe
• Boston Herald

Also:
• Ralph Gants on this blog

Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants was a graduate of Harvard undergrad and law, one-time AUSA, and recipient of an honorary law degree from UMass Law at 2016 Commencement (pictured and below).

Also:
• On criminal justice reform with Jim Braude at WGBH News
• On access to justice at Harvard Law School

HT @ Prof. Cleary.