A Moving Story from Aaron Twerski at the AALS Torts Section

The Torts and Compensation Systems Section of the AALS had a terrific panel on Friday afternoon, the topic of which was the 100th anniversary of MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. and included presentations by the most interesting (in my view) contemporary scholars in tort law, John Goldberg and Ben Zipursky.

The highlight of the session for me, though, was the presentation of the Prosser Award for outstanding achievement in the field to Aaron Twerski of Brooklyn Law. I've long admired Twerski's work and his central role in drafting the Third Restatement on Products Liability. What I did not know--and was recounted by Twerski in his short acceptance speech on Friday--was that he almost did not become a law professor were it not for some good fortune in 1967. Twerski was at the time a teaching fellow at Harvard Law School, which provided an automatic path into a law teaching position. But Twerski (a Hasidic Jew) alone among his colleagues that year did not get a teaching position because, as he put it (and I am quoting here from memory), "I looked like this," pointing to his skullcap and his long beard, and "people were more straightforward about such things back then than they are now." Late in the year, however, he received a call from John Murray (then the acting dean at Duquesne) inviting him to fill a teaching position vacated on account of an unexpected retirement.

As Twerski recounted the story, were it not for that offer some 50 years ago, he would have returned to practice and never set out on his academic career. He concluded, "I would like to think such discrimination is a thing of the past, but I fear it is not." I was especially moved to learn that John Murray (a Catholic and later dean at Villanova Law and president of Duquesne, who died last year) and a Catholic university played such an important role in launching Twerski's distinguished career.