Retiring Faculty A. E. Dick Howard and Richard Bonnie Honored

RISA GOLUBOFF: It is my turn to celebrate two remarkable members of our faculty as they retire and conclude their remarkable careers. So the first is Richard Bonnie of the class of 1969, who is celebrating his 55th law school reunion with classmates this weekend. Before coming to Virginia for law school, Richard, a Norfolk native, studied at Johns Hopkins University, earning his BA in 1966.

With a draft deferment to attend law school, Richard came here just a few months after college graduation. He was a brilliant student here. He was the notes and decisions editor of the Virginia Law Review. He was a Raven Society member. He received the Z Society Award for the highest academic average in his class after all six semesters, that's the valedictorian. And he graduated Order of the Coif.

After graduation, Richard taught here at the law school for a year, starting a criminal appellate clinic, among other things, at a time when there were very few clinics. In 1970, Richard's military commitment with the Air Force took him first to the Pentagon and then to the White House, where he served as associate director of President Nixon's National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, also known as the Shafer Commission. He was the principal architect of the commission's two important reports, including its recommendation that simple possession of marijuana be decriminalized.

Richard came back home to the law school in 1973 when his military service ended. Although his classmate and friend Martha Ballenger, who's here today as well, mentioned that Richard continued to teach here a little bit, even in the years when he was in the Air Force, which was something I did not know. We have been lucky to have him on our faculty ever since.

And if you have done the math, I know law, that's not where we when we're good at math, but if you have done the math, Richard has been on this faculty for more than 50 years. 50 years.

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Richard's life work has been at the intersection of law, psychology, and public health and public policy. He has directed the university's institute of law, psychology, and public policy for more than 40 years. Over the course of these five decades in the academy, Richard has been a prolific scholar, coauthoring leading textbooks on criminal law and public health law.

Writing countless articles and book chapters and authoring, coauthoring, or editing books on everything from the impact of the Brown versus Board of Education decision, to the casebook The Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr-- A Case Study in the Insanity Defense, coauthored with professors Peter Low of the class of '63 and John Jeffries of the class of '73.

And his first book coauthored with Professor Charlie Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction-- A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States, which was published in 1974, was republished in 1999 as, and this is a quote, "a drug policy classic." I really like that. I really like that.

A few things are striking about these examples, and they are only examples because one could not possibly tell you all of them in this short list of some of his academic work. The first is the unbelievably broad range of Richard's intellectual interests, and second is his deep interest in collaboration with his colleagues and his students.

Mildred Robinson, an emeritus colleague and the law school's first tenured Black woman professor, served as Richard's co-editor on Law Touched Our Hearts, a 2009 collection of essays by lawyers who grew up in the era of school desegregation. Mildred recalled that Richard spoke of how the Brown decision animated their project as, quote, "in the service of the constitutional imperative to form a more perfect union." And Mildred reflected, quote, "I believe these words have been my dear friend's polestar throughout his life and work."

When Katharine Janes of the class of 2021, who will clerk next term for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, served as Richard's research assistant during her time here, she shared her interest with him in pursuing legal academia. And I spoke to her recently, Richard, and she is coming back to you to talk more about it. Richard invited her to coauthor a law review article with him. That does not happen every day.

As Katharine put it, "My career as a student and lawyer would not be what it is without Richard Bonnie. He took such care to cultivate me, to be the type of scholar and intellectual I wanted to be, in the field I wanted to be in. His support was unconditional and so genuine, and I will be forever grateful."

In addition to Richard's significant contributions across his 51 years as scholar, teacher, and mentor, Richard has dedicated countless hours to service on national, state, and international matters, bringing his tenacity, his capacious intellect, and his boundless energy to bear on thorny issues, like gun violence, drug, tobacco, and alcohol abuse, juvenile justice reform, and the death penalty.

Among other things, he has served as the associate reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of Children and the Law, and has chaired or been a member of no fewer than 30 committees convened by the National Academy of Medicine, to which he was elected in 1991. That's basically one a year since 1991. That is just extraordinary.

He has also been part of task forces, commissions, and advisory boards, convened by organizations, including the American Bar association, the US Department of Health and Human services, the MacArthur Foundation, the Virginia Supreme Court, the Virginia Bar Association, and the American Psychiatric Association.

In all of his work, Richard has been a driving force of policy change at all levels. And when I say a driving force of policy change, I mean, he actually makes policy change. So our colleague, Professor Mimi Riley, remarked, quote, "This almost never happens, but the Food and Drug Administration has either met or is striving to meet almost all of the recommendations of Richard's landmark opioid committee." This is still Mimi, "By being such an important voice in the national academies, in many ways, he has guided many of the issues that the institution has focused on over the decades."

Richard's career is an example for all of us of what a life of service, both in the academy and beyond it can mean. And the ways that UVA faculty and UVA lawyers both shape the world around them for the better. It is no wonder that the University honored Richard with its Thomas Jefferson Award in 2007, the highest award given to faculty members across the university.

I am delighted to celebrate Richard as an extraordinary scholar and cherished friend, colleague, and mentor. Richard, we, and by we, I incorporate all the deans who came before me and all the deans who will come after me, are so proud to call you one of our own since the day, in 1966, that you first stepped foot in Clark Hall.

We will miss you in your every day presence, but we know that you are innumerable contributions to the field have left an indelible mark. To paraphrase our colleague John Monahan, "You've long been the hardest working man at the law school." And we are so glad that so many of your classmates are able to be here today to celebrate you, too, on your 55th reunion. We wish you the very best on your next chapter as the Harrison Foundation Professor of Medicine and Law Emeritus. Please join me in congratulating Richard Bonnie.

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Richard's going to offer a few remarks, if you want. You don't have to.

RICHARD BONNIE: I had actually prepared something, but I'm not going to deliver what I was going to say. I'm certainly appreciative to Risa, and I want to just connect to the issues that she started talking about, because what I was trying to think that I would say if I were going to give a talk, was thinking about the attachment that I have. And so many of us have.

And so I had my own personal dimension of that in terms of, as you said, I've spent my career here, spent my life here. I feel very attached. So the issue of attachment that you were talking about, it's just it is remarkable, I mean, as you said. And the attachment-- the thing that I was struggling with is I can see it now everywhere, every the times that you've been here in-- the law school is not exactly the same. It's not in the same place as it was when I was in school.

And I kept thinking-- trying to count how many faculty at the time when we were in school in '66 to '69, it's roughly 35, I think, something like that. And I wondered when it's clear, as you've said, all of us, however far back you go, have the attachment that you had described. And the institution isn't the same. The location wasn't the same. So what am I attached to?

And my classmates are here. And I know we feel all the attachment that you were talking about before as students that are attached to this place. And it was a puzzle and I was trying to think about it. So if I were going to give a talk, which I'm not going to give you, it was where does this attachment come from. What is it?

And, of course, you put your hand-- but a lot of what you were talking about has a picture of this. This is not what it was. I'm not attached to Clark Hall. I am attached to this law school, and this is where it is. So anyway, the idea of how we have become so attached to this place is remarkable. And then-- I'm almost done now, because then the question is the faculty. OK.

I mean, I was a student and I became attached. But of course, I've spent my life as an adult here, and I am truly attached to this place. My students are my children. It's just a remarkable place. And everything that you've said about how that happens is just a remarkable thing that we do here. And so I wanted to reflect on that a little bit. So thank you. I mean, I just love being part of this institution. So thank you very much.

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RISA GOLUBOFF: So if you couldn't see, I just gave Richard some champagne for celebration. And I just want to note how appropriate that felt as a law and psychology person to talk about attachment. That just-- I hadn't put it in those terms. My mother's a psychologist, but I'm not. And I love those terms. And I won't have a chance to put it into operation in future speeches, but I know Leslie was listening. Congratulations, Richard. That was beautiful. OK.

I have one last celebration. It seems impossible to imagine that A. E. Dick Howard is retiring. He has been part of the UVA Law family for more than 65 years, which is crazy because he doesn't look a day over 60. And he has been a member of our teaching faculty for six decades. In fact, Dick is the longest serving professor in the history of this law school.

Also, a son of Virginia, Dick was born and raised in Richmond, and he studied at the University of Richmond, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1954. He was then commissioned as an army officer and served at Fort Eustis in Williamsburg for several years, and then came to Virginia for law school.

After earning his LLB from the law school in 1961, Dick clerked for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, where he worked on Justice Black's opinions in Gideon versus Wainwright, which established the right to counsel in state criminal cases, and Griffin v. Board of Supervisors, the case that ended Virginia's massive resistance desegregation. Amazing, right?

Dick also completed a master's degree at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar.

Dick returned to the law school in 1964, recruited by Dean Hardy Cross Dillard of the class of '27 to teach constitutional law, legal philosophy, and evidence. Dick has been a legendary presence in the classroom ever since, serving as a teacher and mentor to-- and I am being literal here-- thousands of UVA Law students.

Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the class of '72 notes that, quote, "There have been generations of Virginia students who have reaped the benefit of having Dick Howard teach them." Retired Fourth Circuit Judge Michael Luttig of the class of 1981, said of Dick, quote, "Among teachers and educators of the Constitution and the Supreme Court, as well as scholars of comparative constitutional law, Dick has no equal. He has lived every day of his sparkling life since joining the faculty, educating his beloved students, Americans, and the world on the Constitution and the rule of law."

Himself, inspired by the law and the Constitution, he has in turn inspired generations of law students and lawyers to a life in the law. In addition to his remarkable contributions to the classroom, Dick has also been an energetic and insightful scholar and a leading voice in the fields of constitutional law, comparative constitutionalism and the Supreme Court.

And I will say this is not in my prepared remarks, but when I clerked for Justice Breyer, I got to the court and I went to see the little movie in the kind of museum part of the court. And I knew I had already accepted my job here, I knew I was coming here the following year. And the movie started, and who should be there interviewing the justices and being my guide to the Supreme Court but Dick Howard? I was just over overwhelmed. It was amazing. I thought, this is-- I'm going to the right place next year.

Dick has written countless law review articles, book chapters, essays, books and monographs, including his commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia, and definitive works on the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, and the work of constitution making in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. Dick's scholarship, teaching, and mentorship have been informed and reinforced by his enormous contributions to public affairs and public life.

In 1968, a young Dick Howard was tapped to serve as the executive director of the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Revision. The commission's role was to revise the Commonwealth's constitution, a 1902 document that had enshrined Jim Crow into the foundational law of this Commonwealth and remained in place in 1968.

As the constitutional revision commission's executive director, Dick was the principal drafter of the new Virginia Constitution, which forbade government discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, or sex, and included protections for public education and the environment, along with more traditional rights to free speech, press, and exercise of religion.

After serving as the lead drafter of the constitution, Dick also led ratification efforts, seeking support for the draft constitution from Virginians across the state and articulating the commission's intentions while serving as counsel to the Virginia General Assembly. After the constitution was ratified in 1971, he wrote several multi-volume commentaries on the document. And I would be remiss not to mention that remains our Commonwealth's Constitution today.

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Dick has also been a consultant to state and federal bodies, including the US Senate and the Judiciary Committee. From 1982 to 1986, he served as counselor to the governor of Virginia. He's chaired Virginia's Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. And has consulted with Virginia political leaders on matters, including the restoration of voting rights to formerly incarcerated people and on political gerrymandering. He has also briefed and argued cases before the state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court.

Dick has lent his experience and service not only to the Commonwealth and the nation, but also to the world. He has consulted on the drafting of new constitutions for governments, including that of Brazil, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Malawi, and South Africa, to name a few, all over the world.

Dick might be called the father of our Virginia Constitution. And he might also be the uncle or godfather of so many state and national constitutions. It is no wonder that the university honored Dick, as it did Richard, with its Jefferson Award, Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest honor given to any faculty member in 2013.

It is no surprise either that Dick has often been listed as one of, quote, "The greatest Virginians of the 20th century," or that so many of our alumni describe him, as graduate Katherine Mims Crocker of the class of 2012 does as, quote, "A wonderful teacher, but also a model, mentor, and friend." Indeed, one of the questions I am most frequently asked when I meet UVA Law alumni on the road is, is Dick Howard still teaching? I have delighted in being able to answer yes for so long.

Dick, for more than six decades, you have been as constant a presence at the law school as the sun rising in the East every morning. You have been a treasured colleague, mentor, and teacher here for 60 years, and I will say it again, the longest-serving faculty member we have ever had. What a boon for us all?

We and our law school have been made better by having you as one of our own, for countless alumni and faculty, your mentorship and friendship have been invaluable. And for generations of law students, a class with Dick Howard was the signal experience of their time here. You have made your mark on this place, Dick Howard. So please join me in congratulating Dick and invite him up to say a few words.

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Wanted it a little higher?

DICK HOWARD: I'm kidding. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all. One of the great things about being a professor is people may have their slings and arrows while you're still in the classroom and think you gave them the grade that was not the one they deserved. But then they graduate, they get their job, they start making more money than professors make and the great successes, and all is forgotten. Then it's good-old Professor Howard.

So I'm so happy to have a chance to be with all of you here. I suspect there are some former students in the classroom, yes, I thought there'd be a few. Relax, no cold calling today. OK. You're not on call for anything. But I never intended to be a professor. I was born and raised in Richmond, as Risa pointed out.

I came to the law school with a lot of my contemporaries. I expected to go back to Richmond, join a law firm, and spend my life making money and playing tennis at The Country Club of Virginia, and then just living the good life. Well, what intervened was being in Washington for a short time, I was at a law firm, Covington & Burling, and my best friend in law school was John Rhinelander, who had been editor in chief of the law review, on whose staff I served.

And we would have lunch in DC and he was clerking for John Marshall Harlan at the Supreme Court. Well, he was having such a good time. I said, I had never applied for a clerkship in law school. I mean, it's hard to believe today, but we had no culture of clerkships in those days. It was just not what many-- today everybody who can will get a clerkship.

I'd never applied for one as a law student. I think I might have been the third person in the law school's history to serve as a law clerk at the Supreme Court. There were two I can think of before me, including John. So I said, I think I'll apply for it. I didn't know much about the application process, so I sat down.

I had one of those old manual typewriters, the kind that flipped down like this, painfully typed out nine application letters. No computers in those days. I mean, they were dreadful, whiteouts and strike overs. And I mean, the justices should have thrown those letters out on aesthetic grounds. Well, I got five interviews. I was very flattered. So I went to these interviews.

My heart was set on Hugo Black because I loved his opinions. He had the power of the law, the convictions about the constitution. But of course, if Tom Clark or somebody else had said, we have a job, you're not going to say, well, let me put you on hold while I see what your colleagues--

So it was my blessing that Hugo Black was the first. I'll never know if I would have gotten another offer from another justice or not. But Hugo Black came through. And so as luck would have it, this is where history plays wonderful sometimes a good card, sometimes not.

Between the time that I accepted the job and the time I reported for work, Felix Frankfurter had a stroke, left the court. His place was taken by Arthur Goldberg, and so that seat on the court flipped from the conservative side to the liberal side. And here's Hugo Black. 25 years he'd been in dissent, writing the big dissents. Suddenly he's in the catbird seat. He's in the majority.

And he and Earl Warren were very close. So he was getting the big opinions. You mentioned Gideon, Gideon versus Wainwright will forever be in the casebooks. The Prince Edward County case, Griffin, born and raised in Richmond as I was under the shadow of the Lost Cause and all those monuments, this was a kind of expiation for me to be at Hugo Black's elbow when he was writing the Prince Edward County case.

So by this point, my plans to be a practicing lawyer in Richmond had kind of faded, and I was beginning to think maybe this more in-- and that's when Hardy Dillard called me. Now, today, we have the most complicated process. If you want an appointment as a law professor, they read everything you've written and you come up and do a workshop, and you go around talk to everybody. In those days, I expect that Hardy was probably the appointments committee.

And he had taught me and I did some research for him, and he said, I guess we have a place on the law faculty for Dick Howard. So I got a telephone call from Hardy Dillard, would you like to think about teaching? And I said, well, I will give that a shot. I knew if I didn't like it, I can always go back into practice. Go back to Richmond. Well, the die was cast.

It was cast. From the day I stepped into the classroom, I knew I'd done the right thing. There was no turning back at that point. Of course, I've been able to brief and argue cases. I've done what lawyers do, but so much of my time now, the place we're attached to that you describe so beautifully became a home for the next 60 years.

If somebody had told me when I started teaching, you know Dick, you'll still be in the classroom 60 years from now. I would have said, you've been smoking something. It cannot be the case. Well, those years have come and gone so much more quickly than I would have thought. But what a wonderful place to be, not only for what I did inside the law school itself, which has always been my home, but for the opportunities in the world at large.

I mean, I'd only been on the faculty two or three years when the Commission on Constitutional Revision was formed by Governor Mills Godwin, and they needed a draftsman, sort of a person to do the-- putting it all together. They came to me, can you help us? I said, hey, piece of cake. I'd say young law professors are like that, aren't they? You know, hey, no barrier. I said, sure, I can help you write a constitution.

Well, what was I thinking? That it's like a will or a deed. You go to the form book and we, the people of and fill in the blank, or what are you-- what I didn't have the heart to tell them at the time was I had not read the old Virginia Constitution. I don't recall my professors when I was a student talking about the state constitution. It was terra incognita to me.

So I went and read it, I found that it did, for example, it required if you fought a duel in Virginia or seconded it, you lost your right to vote. So we decided maybe that was not one of the great burning social issues of modern Virginia. So we took it out. So if dueling has returned, you can blame me for that. All right.

I mean, I started reading other state constitutions, like Louisiana has a provision that requires-- says that Huey P. Long's birthday shall forever be a state holiday in Louisiana. This is the world. So this introduced me to state constitutions. Then not too many years after that, I got a call from the State Department. Would I talk to a Hungarian delegation? They were setting out to write a new Hungarian Constitution. I said, sure, bring them down.

So we did a couple of days seminars on how you write a constitution. I then got invitations to Budapest. I love the great music capitals of Europe. So I said, sure, I'm happy to go there. So I went. I could feel change in the air. I knew something big was happening. The Soviet Empire was about to collapse. I started in Budapest. Then I don't know how the word got around, but I started getting calls from other capitals. Howard does constitutions.

And so Warsaw and Bucharest and Prague and other places. So I spent some time on the road. Now, that all sounds irrelevant to teaching at the law school, but it's not. One of the blessings of being in this place was that not only do we care about what happens in our classroom and in our scholarship and the like, we care about the larger world.

All those clinics that Risa talked about, and the like, is a part of that expansion. We're not a-- we never were that parochial, but we are more of the world than we've ever been. So I found that each time I was on the road in Bucharest or wherever, I'd bring those ideas back to the classroom. And what I tried to do was draw my students into it as well.

So what I have seen is a career that's been partly here at the law school, partly somewhere else, but it's all of a piece. It really is all fitted together in a beautiful kind of way. And I've also-- think about the 60 years of feels like constitutional law. What a trajectory from the Warren Court, one person, one vote, incorporation of the bill of rights, all those great things.

You then trace it through the Burger Court. No counter revolution. People expected one, it didn't happen. The Rehnquist Court, you see originalism appearing on the scene. The Roberts Court, we all know about the counter majority. We have to start rethinking how we teach and think about constitutional law because of what's happening in Washington right now. That's the history of the constitution unfolding in so many ways. So I have been blessed to live through all of that.

And it makes me really thoughtful not only what I've had the chance to do myself, but the people that I can thank for the chance to do it. Mentors, friends, colleagues, and the like, Hardy Dillard, for example, to be in his classroom was to be in the theater. I mean, he was the nearest thing to a showman. Some of you will remember those years. He taught me a lot about how to be a good professor.

Hugo Black taught me how to write. He didn't want me to write fancy law tones, he wanted me to talk like ordinary people talk. So I learned how to write from him. But here at the law school, I was exposed to colleagues and students. Colleagues who are doing things I could never imagine. They've new horizons, new teachings. And I've been able to ask these people to work on-- look at my drafts and make comments.

And my students, I've taken so many chances to try to draw students into projects occasionally as a coauthor of a piece. And they do the real work, and then I add my name to it at the top. But other kinds of projects, whether they may be for the Bar Association for people in Washington or Richmond.

And so when I've been on the road, my students are there with me. Mark Brzezinski, now the American ambassador to Poland, one of our graduates, was with me in Warsaw when I was working for the Polish Senate. And I've always tried to find opportunities for those people to help me do more than I would have done otherwise. And I learned from them.

There's no place for me that makes me happier than to be in the classroom. My students, they're smart. Some of them are a lot smarter than I am, but I don't let the ball wrestle long enough for them to find that out. I mean, I don't want them to say, he's not that smart. Experience and seasoning goes a long way. So I've learned from these students. I've learned from my colleagues. And it comes right down to the people who make this place what it is.

We always talk about how special UVA students are. It's a fact. It's absolute fact. I mean, I've lectured at scores of other law schools and universities around the country, there's not one-- I suppose if they gave me enough money, I might be tempted, but there's no place I'd rather teach than this one. This is the best possible place on the face of the globe to teach about, to write about, to think about, to be part of the world of law, and to watch it unfold before you, as I've had the privilege of doing.

So this law school has shaped my mind. It's nurtured me. It's supported me and sustained me in so many ways. And I owe so much debt to my colleagues, to my former teachers, to the people I've taught myself. I'm profoundly grateful. If I found the fountain of youth, I'll come back for another 60 years. I'm not prepared to hang it up.

And the many people in this room that are part of that debt to whom I owe this small down payment today, you've not heard the last of me yet. I guess Richard Nixon said something like that. So let's hope that what you have yet to see is a better record than that. But I want to thanks to everybody in this room and I'm, as I said, so much in your debt. Thank you so much.

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RISA GOLUBOFF: So I gave Dick a bottle of champagne as well. And I just want to say, Dick, I'm under the impression you have found the fountain of youth. So I don't know what you're talking about if you find it. Congratulations, Richard. Congratulations, Dick. What extraordinary, extraordinary people and careers you are and you have had.

It is just to celebrate you both on the same day, I mean, it's a real loss for our university and our law school and for me personally. And I hope you will stay in touch. And I just want to say what an honor to pay tribute to you both. So thank you.

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