On July 1, I will officially be the Gary T. Schwarz Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA (along with a Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and the Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project).

Alhthough it is of course an honor to be awarded any academic chair, this chair is really special to me. Gary was a professor of mine and on my doctoral dissertation committee when I was at UCLA. He was brilliant and quirky, a voracious reader and a keen legal mind. He was intellectually curious and prolific. He profoundly shaped tort doctrine through his scholarship and through his work as a Reporter on the first part of the mammoth Restatement (Third) of Torts for the American Law Institute. He could translate complex doctrine into understandable prose and test the latest academic theory against real evidence.

Most importantly for me as a student, Gary was an relentless cheerleader when I sought work as an academic, getting on the phone to his many contacts across the country, and an unremitting coach to push me to do better on my scholarship. You couldn’t slip any sloppy reasoning or half-formed thought by Gary. When he offered praise, it really meant that I had accomplished something.

It’s not lost on me as I approach 60 that Gary died early and surprisingly of a malignant brain tumor when he was 61. It was a loss for all of us. I want to think that some of my work (with Doug Laycock) on one of the last parts of the Third Restatement of Torts will be a fitting tribute to his legacy.

I take over the chair from Eugene Volokh, who takes emeritus status and moves onto Stanford’s Hoover Institution July 1. Eugene was a year behind me at UCLA Law School, and we began our spirited but always cordial debates over the nature of law in Dan Lowenstein’s 1990 Election Law course. Dan, another of my exemplary mentors, wrote to me: “I cannot imagine a better chair to hold than one named after Gary Schwartz.” Indeed.