I saw yesterday the sad news that Harvard Law Professor Dick Fallon had passed away from cancer at age 73. Apparently the cancer diagnosis came relatively suddenly; most people did not know he was sick.
I certainly did not know Dick as well as many of those eulogizing him. But I did have one significant occasion to interact with him.
In 2019, I was writing my "Sadomasochistic Judging" article technically as a book review of Fallon's "Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court", though a review in the "law journal" style of book review where the book is a thinly-veiled excuse to talk about things I already wanted to talk about.
Anyway, that fall he happened to be keynoting the Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium, which I attend each year and where I was going to be presenting a draft of my article. I was a total nobody at the time -- still in grad school at Berkeley -- but Dick attended my talk and gave warm feedback. Since it was technically a review of his book, I remember specifically asking him whether he felt I had presented his views fairly, he responded by saying that as a rule he tries "to avoid comment on other people’s readings of [his] work," because once "it is out in the public domain, I have no more expertise than anyone else about how my words ought to be read or interpreted." It was, I told him, a genuinely principled non-originalist position!
Non-comment notwithstanding, he was very complimentary about the project and clearly just a warm and inviting figure. I'm sorry I didn't get to know him better. May his memory be a blessing.
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