A Great Mind, A Giant Heart

A U of MN Law School Legend 

I just left the final class of Professor Donald Marshall. Prof. Marshall is one of the most amazingly gifted professors to have ever wandered the halls of Mondale. While I had a healthy fear of him during his Torts class my first semester of law school, he couldn’t restrain his compassion for students and his love of teaching from showing through.

Flashback late August 2003, I’m just a lowly grunt of a first year law student. A bright-eyed doe in the headlights of legal education, frozen by the immensity of it all. I enter my first Torts class sit down and soon after he walks into the room. Under one arm he carries a large piece of cardboard with a large print seating chart attached to it and his worn and tattered notebook full of the accumulated wisdom of years of legal teaching and scholarship. In the other hand, a small cup of coffee likely purchased a minute before at the vending machine. For those of you who have seen 'The Paper Chase,' he was a less vile John Houseman.

He begins class: “Everyone turn to the case of the thorns.” “What is the procedural posture?” His gaze moves from the seating chart to the room and back again. Nobody wants the first question, and even if they did, no one has any clue what a procedural posture is anyway. This was a without a doubt one of the scariest moments of my life.

But, by the end of the semester, Prof. Marshall was one of my favorite teachers of all time. Tough but fair, with an unbounded knowledge of the subject matter. A grandfatherly figure that exuded concern about the growth of the fledgling legal minds we were. Not in a condescending, or paternalistic way, but instead he played the part of a mother bird pushing us out of the nest – forcing us to test our shaky legal eagle wings.

And no one in attendance for the last class of first year torts, will ever forget the poem Prof. Marshall read. After coming back from medical health issues to teach our class, he told us at the end of that last day of class that “teaching you has been redemptive.” How could you not like the guy after he says something like that.

Prof. Marshall has also provided some unintended symmetry between my father and I. Prof. Marshall began teaching at the law school during my father’s third year of law school, and today I had the honor of witnessing Prof. Marshall’s last class. While I’m sure his first class was received with less fan-fare, it was no doubt just as enlightening.

Prof. Marshall, you will be missed.