Professor Marshall Shapo leaves extraordinary legacy

Marshall S. Shapo
Northwestern photo by Jasmin Shah

Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha'olam, dayan ha-emet. 

A luminary in American legal education, a brilliant scholar in torts, and a dear mentor and friend, Professor Emeritus Marshall S. Shapo died Friday, at 87, in Chicagoland.

A professor at Northwestern University Law School for more than 40 years, most of his more-than-half-century academic career, Shapo was a prolific scholar and award-winning authority on torts and product liability law. In his books, articles, and teaching, Shapo saw tort law as inextricable from culture, politics, and society. Accordingly, he approached his subject matter holistically, embracing historical, economic, and critical perspectives as all essential, and none alone definitive, to understand the law.

It was that breadth of perspective that prompted me to adopt the second edition of Shapo's Tort and Injury Law as my textbook when I started teaching torts 20 years ago, in 2003. Reflective of Shapo's versatility of mind and insatiable curiosity, his pedagogy challenged students at once with writings in ancient philosophy and religion, and with theories of economics and feminism. References to the Torah appeared alongside excerpts from research in the latest interdisciplinary social science.

I reached out to Marshall in 2003 for guidance in using his book; I did not then suspect that he would become my extraordinary mentor. I was privileged to join Tort and Injury Law as a co-author for the third edition in 2006. My teaching today in torts, and in Tortz, is and forever will be a product of Shapo's worldview. His teaching lives on in my career and classes, and no doubt in the practices and lives of his generations of students and mentees, and theirs in turn.

Yet Tort and Injury Law was a only small part of Marshall's importance to me. Of incalculable value were his insights into academic life, his counsel, especially in times of hardship, and, so often, simply his enduring friendship. As relentlessly busy and productive as he always was, he called me periodically with no agenda, just to check in. However much I wished not to burden him with mundane ups and downs, he somehow, with the skill of a seasoned counselor, elicited my confessions. His humility and wisdom were invariably comforting. Never was there a frustration—a discontented student, a shortsighted colleague—that Shapo had not faced and hurdled already in his career: evidence that I, too, could land well on the other side.

Shapo above else modeled balance of work and life. His obituary honors his surviving wife, Helene—also an inspiring and renowned legal educator—sons, Benjamin and Nathaniel; and six grandchildren and great-grandson.

Appropriately, Shapo's family led off the obituary, before any mention of his career. Marshall himself placed his wife and sons at the top of his CV. Never did I have a catch-up conversation with Marshall in which he did not update me on their well-being. When speaking of grandchildren, he radiated with a joy that not even product liability litigation could evoke. All of his accomplishments and honors as a lawyer and educator meant nothing to him in comparison with his devotion to family.

Marshall, rest in peace.

The Shapo family invites memorial contributions to the American Parkinson's Disease Association, P.O. Box 61420, Staten Island, N.Y. 10306.