My life

Besides my interaction with the students, the best thing about being a law professor was being part of a faculty filled with people I liked and admired. My best friends on the faculty were two people my age, Elizabeth Osenbaugh and Dick Atkinson. Elizabeth was a brilliant Iowa farm girl, a good Democrat, and a devoted teacher who became good friends with Hillary, too. Eventually, she went back to Iowa to work in the Attorney General’s office. When I was elected President, I persuaded her to come to the Justice Department, but after a few years she again went back home, largely because she thought it would be better for her young daughter, Betsy. Sadly, Elizabeth died of cancer in 1998, and her daughter went to live with Elizabeth’s brother. I have tried to keep in touch with Betsy over the years; her mother was one of the finest people I’ve ever known. Dick Atkinson was a friend from law school who had grown dissatisfied with private practice in Atlanta. I suggested he consider teaching and urged him to come to Fayetteville for an interview. He did, and was offered and accepted a position on our faculty. The students loved Dick, and he loved teaching. In 2003, he would become Dean of the Arkansas Law School. Our most famous and fascinating professor was Robert Leflar, the most eminent legal scholar our state ever produced, a recognized authority in torts, conflicts of law, and appellate judging. In 1973, he was already past the mandatory retirement age of seventy and was teaching a full load for a dollar a year. He had been on the faculty since he was twenty-six. For several years before I knew him, Bob had commuted weekly between Fayetteville and New York, where he taught a course in appellate judging to federal and state judges at New York University Law School, a course that more than half the Supreme Court justices had taken. He was never late for class in either place. Bob Leflar was a small, wiry man with huge, piercing eyes, and he was still as strong as an ox. He couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds, but while working in his yard he carried around big chunks of flagstone that I could hardly lift. After every Razorback football homecoming game, Bob and his wife, Helen, hosted a party in their home. Sometimes guests would play touch football in the front yard. I remember one game in particular, when Bob and I and another young lawyer played against two big young guys and a nine-year-old boy. The game was tied and we all agreed that whoever scored next would win. Our side had the ball. I asked Bob if he really wanted to win. He said, “I sure do.” He was as competitive as Michael Jordan. So I told the third man on our team to center the ball, let the rusher come after me, and go block the tall man defending the backfield to the right. The nine-year-old was covering Bob, on the assumption that I’d throw the ball to the taller, younger man, or that if Bob got the ball the kid would be able to touch him. I told Bob to block the kid to the right too, then run hard left, and I’d throw the ball to him right before the rusher got to me. When the ball was snapped, Bob was so excited he knocked the boy to the ground and ran left. He was wide open when our teammate completed his blocking assignment. I lobbed the ball to Bob and he ran across the goal line, the happiest seventy-fiveyear-old man in America. Bob Leflar had a steel-trap mind, the heart of a lion, a tough will, and a childlike love of life. He was sort of a Democratic version of Strom Thurmond. If we had more like him, we’d win more often. When Bob died at ninety-three, I thought he was still too young to go. Law school policies were set by the faculty at regular meetings. On occasion I thought they ran too long and got too mired in details best left to the dean and other administrators, but I learned a lot about academic governance and politics in them. Generally, I deferred to my colleagues when there was a consensus because I felt they knew more than I did and had a longer-term commitment to the academic life. I did urge the faculty to undertake more pro bono activities and to relax the “publish or perish”

imperative for professors in favor of greater emphasis on classroom teaching and spending more out-ofclass time with students. My own pro bono work included handling minor legal problems for students and a young assistant professor; trying—unsuccessfully—to persuade more doctors in Springdale, just north of Fayetteville, to accept poor patients on Medicaid; preparing a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in an antitrust case at the request of Attorney General Jim Guy Tucker; and, in my first appearance as a lawyer in court, filing a brief to defend my friend State Representative Steve Smith in an election-law dispute in Madison County.