Gerald Gunther
1927-July 30, 2002
Stanford, California
Gerald Gunther, a constitutional law scholar whose book on the subject is the "Bible" for many scholars, died July 30, 2002, of lung cancer. He was 75.
He served as a mentor to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she attended Columbia School of Law where he taught.
Born in 1927 in Usingen im Taunus, Germany, he emigrated as a young boy to the United States with his family in 1938, just before the Nazis' invasion of Czechoslovakia. He grew up in New York City.
After graduating from Brooklyn College, earned his master's degree in public law and government from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude.
From 1956 to 1962, he was a faculty member at Columbia University's School of Law. He was recruited to Stanford and spent the next 40 years there, with visiting stints at other law schools.
His classes were extremely popular and highly rated, said Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan.
"He was a beloved teacher to four decades of law students, an astute and brilliant analyst of the law, a scholar of impeccable intellectual integrity, and a man of unbounded generosity and unstinting kindness to all those who worked with him," Sullivan said.
Perhaps his greatest contribution was the casebook, "Constitutional Law," which beginning in the 1960s, was the most widely used constitutional law text in American law schools. He published dozens of essays and books on legal matter, including the biography, "Learned Hand: The Judge and the Man."
An expert on the U.S. Supreme Court, he was periodically considered a leading candidate for appointment to the bench. He never was appointed, but he did testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993.
He is survived by his wife Barbara Gunther of Stanford; two sons, Daniel Gunther of San Francisco and Andrew Gunther of Santa Cruz; brother Herbert Gutenstein of Riverdale, N.Y.; and two grandchildren.
Tags: teacher/educator
