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Professor John Kaplan, Stanford Law School  The late (1989) John Kaplan was my mentor and friend during my law studies at Stanford Law School. John had the quickest mind of anyone I have ever met so it is no surprise that he was famed for his brilliance among his peers. John authored a number of extremely successful books which I had the pleasure to edit while still a student, especially the widely used textbook Criminal Justice. When I first started at Stanford Law School, I was the research assistant for Professor Herbert Packer, a man respected by everyone, author of a pioneer book, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, who was scheduled to become Dean of the Yale Law School, but whose career was cut short by an untimely paralyzing and ultimately fatal stroke at age 42. My work with John Kaplan began about that same time. We both realized that the criminal law had lost a great and valuable man. John's major contribution to my own intellectual development was his tremendous scepticism of the rationality of mainstream fact-finding and decisionmaking. John was of the opinion that many people in positions of responsibility do not do their homework thoroughly or objectively enough and that many of the facts upon which society based its decisions were poorly researched. Hence, the decisions based on them were often falsely based. Things were not as they seemed. John urged that one always go back to original sources first and never make important decisions or conclusions drawn on second-hand knowledge, research or information. He said this applied not only to the law but all areas of life. John was not a theoretician in his views of evidence and fact-finding and his views are extremely current in the modern digitial age where the amount of information available is exploding. So much information - who to believe? John had been a prosecutor in Chicago for a number of years and had only become a law professor because, as he put it, "I got to be too good at my job as prosecutor and was running the risk of putting people behind bars who did not belong there." In other words, John knew how to deal with hard facts and questions of evidence on the front lines of law. His skepticism of mainstream decisionmaking is an attitude I inherited from him and share down to this day, because experience has shown that he was right. Return to the Select Tops Index Page Select Tops Index Page |
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