I am extremely honored to have been asked to write a dedication of this issue of the Mitchell Hamline Law Review in honor of my dear friend and remarkable colleague, Marie Failinger. Marie and I started our teaching careers at Hamline University School of Law on the same day more than forty years ago. I always get nervous when I reveal that. I think of the old joke about the lawyer who passed away at the relatively young age of sixty. When he asked Saint Peter at the pearly gates why God had taken him at when he was just sixty, Saint Peter replied, “Sixty? According to your time sheets you are 85!” All I can say is I’m thankful there are no time sheets in academia. Otherwise, I can imagine that when I tell people Marie and I started on the same day and retired within six months of each other, there would be a scratching of heads and comments like, “That’s strange. According to your time sheets, you were only at Hamline half as long as Marie.”
Nobody works as hard as Marie Failinger. Faculty members always talk about the “three legs” of the job of a law professor: teaching, scholarship, and service. And whenever there is a discussion at faculty meetings about the expectations for faculty productivity, folks always seek the assurance that when evaluations take place, “strength in one area can balance less activity in another.” That is not the Marie Failinger model. Marie was a dedicated, effective teacher; a remarkable, deep-thinking and productive scholar; and she engaged in prolific and important service, particularly with her efforts to increase opportunities for women in the legal profession. And she did this all the while being a devoted single mother raising her daughters and grandchildren.
Marie came to Hamline after spending the early years of her career as a legal services lawyer in southern Indiana, not a place that welcomed such lawyers with open arms back then. In a small-world story, my boss, the Managing Director of the ABA Section of Legal Education, where I worked the last several years of my career, told me Marie was his first boss out of law school. He told me not only was Marie the best boss he ever worked for, but that he learned an enormous amount about being a lawyer and about courage from Marie. He said it was remarkable to watch Marie advocate for her clients, making creative legal arguments, never backing down, and almost lecturing (we’ll call it “educating”) the judges on their obligation to do their duty to address the injustices her clients were facing. And doing so in a way that did not draw the ire, but instead the respect, of the judges.
I’m not surprised that Marie earned the respect of judges she appeared before. I watched Marie quickly earn the enormous respect of her colleagues at Hamline. One indication of that is her being selected to serve as associate dean, probably the most difficult job at a law school, as a relatively junior faculty member extremely early in her career. Given the issues that an associate dean must deal with, and the sometimes-sensitive discussions an associate dean must have with colleagues, that is a remarkable statement about how her colleagues felt about Marie very early in her career.
Part of Marie gaining the respect of her colleagues was, as I’ve mentioned, how hard she worked. But it was more than that. It wasn’t just the long hours she put in, but the ideas she had and the projects she worked on. Daniel Burnham, the famed Chicago architect and moving force behind the 1893 Chicago World Fair, reportedly told city leaders thinking about hosting a World’s Fair, “Make no little plans.” That could have been Marie’s mantra. I confess that on many occasions, Marie would propose an idea or a project the school should undertake, and I would think, “Well, that’s not realistic—we’re not Yale or Harvard; we don’t have those kinds of resources.” But that never stopped Marie. She knew that extra hard work could help overcome a lack of resources, and she also understood that even if we were only able to accomplish half of the big project, or a quarter of it, it would be worth the effort and would improve the school and the lives of our students. Marie never made little plans! And her efforts always improved the school and the lives of her students.
Marie also gained the respect of her colleagues because she unfailingly urged us to “do the right thing.” No one had a stronger moral compass, or followed it so unfailingly, than Marie. Those who have attended law school might recall the classic tort concept of a defendant who had “a clean heart, but an empty mind.” That is not Marie. Marie has a sparkling clean heart, but a remarkably intellectual mind. That mind produced prodigious amounts of scholarship. And the scholarship typically was not the run-of-the-mill review of court decisions or legal doctrine. Marie’s scholarship was original, intellectually robust, and often dealt with, and offered a unique take on, significant moral and ethical issues facing the legal profession and the world.
When I contemplate Marie’s career, the John Wesley quote that concluded every graduation Marie and I attended at Hamline comes to mind: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, for as long as ever you can.” Many of us were inspired by that quote, but Marie lived that quote more fully than anyone I know.
There are not enough honors and accolades available to do justice to the legal career of Marie Failinger, but I am extremely pleased that the Board of the Mitchell Hamline Law Review is dedicating this issue to Marie. This gesture no doubt will mean a lot to Marie. It is particularly appropriate given her dedication to legal scholarship both as the author of dozens (and dozens) of law review articles, numerous contributions to books, and many, many essays in a wide variety of publications, as well as her years of service as an author, Board member, and Editor-in-Chief of the highly regarded Journal of Law and Religion. Congratulations, Marie, on your career, on the enormous impact you have had on the lives and careers of hundreds of students, and on the honor of having this issue dedicated to you. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the privilege of calling you a friend and colleague for the past forty years.