I was a student in the first law school class Bill Stuntz ever taught, Criminal Procedure in fall 1986 at the University of Virginia. We all knew he was a new teacher—and even that he had graduated from Virginia just two years earlier-- but he didn’t seem like a new teacher at all. He was completely in command of the material and the class. The other thing I remember about the class is how Professor Stuntz engaged the half-baked ideas we served up in response to his questions. He never pretended a wrong answer was somehow correct—he was too fastidious for that. But his response invited further engagement. “Oh, I don’t know,” he would say, trailing off in a way that made clear that, while he did in fact know, he was open to further ideas and conversation.
He wrote to me in an official capacity after I graduated that spring, which gave me an
excuse to stay in touch. I had learned that he, like I, was an evangelical Christian, which gave us
something in common. And he was only three years older than I was, which made it easier to
call him by his first name than with my other professors.
Bill’s letters—we wrote letters back then, and put stamps on them—always started with
an apology. “How can I apologize enough for being such a rude (non-) correspondent?” he wrote in 1988. Like a good older brother (he himself was the youngest of four boys, I later learned), Bill added a paragraph of thoughtful encouragement. “What you’ve been doing this year,” he wrote— I was in the midst of a judicial clerkship—“counts as a real public service. A lot depends on judges doing their job well, and as you know they in turn depend heavily on their staffs. I hope, when his year is over, you can look back on it and say that you’ve helped the cause of justice, even if only in small ways.” (Bill spoke of “justice” earnestly and without irony, back in an era when a first year law student might be ridiculed for using the term; he cared deeply about justice.)
When I applied for teaching jobs, Bill was one of my recommenders. When the head of the hiring committee that hired me called to invite me for a callback, she couldn’t help but mention how delightful her conversation with Bill had been.
Our relationship in those early years consisted mostly of letters, along with occasional calls and visits. Bill sent reprints of his recently published law review articles, usually with a little hand-written note on the cover. One speculated about when the boys in our respective families would “become civilized.” “Something for your cylindrical file,” said another. Bill’s articles were, of course, anything but destined for the trash. Even to an outsider to Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure like myself, it was obvious that Bill was transforming the field. Others have written about how he, unlike others in the field, thought about the criminal justice system as a whole, and the incentives of the human actors within it, as in his classic article contending that the Warren Court’s imposition of new rights for criminal defendants had the unintended consequence of proceduralizing criminal law and discouraging efforts to demonstrate innocence.1 I read the articles because they concerned issues of urgency for all of us—such as the pathologies of criminal justice—and because they were so surprising and, for lack of a better word, fun to read.
In spring 1996, my family and I came down to Charlottesville for a semester-long visit at the University of Virginia. A major blizzard—still known as the 1996 blizzard in my neighborhood—hit right before the semester. Due to the blizzard, I drove down a few days before my family. When I arrived, I found that Bill had arranged for the driveway to be shoveled at the house my family and I would be renting. Bill’s wife Ruth, who was equally thoughtful, arranged for multiple play outings for us and our young children throughout the spring. The week I was scheduled to present a paper, I completely and mysteriously lost my voice. The presentation was a disaster as a result. Bill made a point to come to my office right afterwards, with words of consolation (“I didn’t think it was bad at all.”)
Bill could be maddening too. Bill was the only law professor I’ve ever known who once complained that his pay raise was too big, not too small. And he was constantly asking for advice, not just about difficult or uncertain issues, but even on obvious ones. Carol Steiker has recalled Bill asking, near the end of his life, after grueling cancer treatments and the cancer itself had taken their toll, whether “it would be OK for him to miss a particular faculty workshop or meeting.” The last time I talked to Bill, he called to ask whether I thought it was okay to dedicate his posthumous masterpiece The Collapse of American Criminal Justice to Carol and Mike Klarman, who midwifed the book into print, rather than to God or someone who shared his Christian beliefs. Of course it was. No doubt he would have come to these conclusions himself, but he persistently tested his thinking communally and in relationship.
Bill’s own advice could be surprising and initially counterintuitive, like his scholarship. While Mike, Carol and I were arranging a conference to celebrate his work a year before he died, I confided to Bill that I found myself tempted to try to use the conference for my own professional aggrandizement. I expected Bill to say something along the lines of, yes, true Christian humility requires us to suppress this kind of ambition, but it’s something we all struggle with. That’s not what Bill said. After disclaiming any wisdom or insight, as always (“Far be it from me to assess anyone else’s heart (I barely know my own)”), he wrote, “I think you’re wrestling too much. There isn’t anything wrong with seeking some professional gain for yourself in this or any other conference—that’s the chief reason to have conferences; if no one benefits from this one, or no one but me, it will have been a failed event, I think.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, around the time he moved from Virginia to Harvard, Bill and I both began thinking in a more sustained way about the intersection between our evangelical Christian faith and law. In Spring 2002, I put together a little series of lectures on Christianity and law at Penn Law, where I teach. I gave two of the talks, and Bill came down from Harvard and gave the other, which he called “Loving Law Too Much (and God Too Little).” Bill showed a Doonesbury cartoon in which a character exclaims, “I love the law!” to frame his theme of the dangers of overreliance on the use of new laws to try to police morality. Bill drew on some of these ideas in a stunning essay review—a classic, in my view-- of an important book on Christianity and law the following year.2 We subsequently wrote two articles together on related themes, the first developing a Christian perspective on the proper scope of secular law, and the second exploring the history of gambling and other morals legislation in similar terms.3
As I’ve noted elsewhere, working with Bill on an article or talk was like playing the role of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, the movie about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As I recall the scene, Salieri is helping Mozart complete a piece as Mozart was dying. Salieri’s eyes light up as he sees where Mozart is going, and he feverishly writes the notes down in anticipation. But then Mozart does something completely unexpected and astonishing, leaving Salieri gaping in awe.
As evangelical Christians, Bill and I were unusual in legal academia. We also both felt a little out of place in the dominant evangelical culture of the time. The original Religious Right was still ascendant, and many of our fellow evangelicals seemed inordinately focused on finding legal solutions to culture wars issues. At the end of 2007, I asked Bill if he might be interested in starting a blog together. Lots of people were starting blogs, the predecessor to the Substack accounts that are proliferating today. Writing a blog might be an opportunity to write about a wide range of issues from a somewhat different perspective than most of our friends in the legal academy and in our churches.
Bill’s initial response was to demur. He had been suffering from severe back pain since the beginning of the decade (“my personal Y2K,” he called it in a short essay on pain in the New Republic), and his internist had just discovered during a regular checkup that he was bleeding internally. “Doing work is harder than it has been,” Bill wrote, “and not just because of my back. (‘Just’: I love that word.) I don’t think I can handle the blog right now.” Over the next week or two, as his health prognosis darkened, Bill’s thinking shifted. The blog might be “an easy way to get some ideas out without having to do magazine-length pieces,” and to sharing his thinking in “brief posts on ideas I care about.” After Bill learned that he did indeed have cancer a few weeks later, in late February 2008, he sent me drafts of a welcome post and posts on Isaiah 40 and Michelle Obama.
Bill posted on our blog—called Less than the Least— for the last three years of his life. He commented on issues of all kinds, including candid updates on his struggles with cancer. He wrote about chemo brain (the chemo drugs “seem to have roughly the same effect on mental acuity as repeated viewings of ‘Legally Blonde,’” he wrote); the incongruity of the idea that cancer victims battle cancer (my body is more like a battlefield, being bombed by chemo) or “Live Strong” (“I can’t live strong, because there isn’t much strength in me. But I can live weak”); and the moments of beauty breaking into his awful ordeal (listening to Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River” as he looked out from his hospital room over the Charles River). An enterprising reader of Bill’s cancer posts assembled some of them into a little pamphlet that circulated widely in churches around the country. Even as Bill was failing, he was a help to others.
All these years later, I still sometimes dream about—and often imagine-- having conversations with Bill. What would the scholar and man who agonized about the racial disparities in our prisons, and who wrote presciently about the pathologies of our criminal justice system, have said about the killing of George Floyd and the cultural tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic? What insights might he have about the immigration crisis and the closing of government agencies? I don’t know, of course, but his writing and his example are bright lights that the darkness will not overcome for me and for many others as we wrestle with these issues in our scholarship and in our lives.
