The Sterling Law Building photographed on October 2, 2018 houses the Yale Law School in New Haven.

On a sunny New England afternoon eons ago, I sat in a Yale classroom with maybe 30 students awaiting the arrival of their professor, a native Texan named Charles Black whom I had come to profile. Black was a published poet who had taught himself Icelandic so he could read the 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic sagas in their original language, a harmonica player who had learned the instrument back home in Austin from an aged ex-slave, and a trumpet player who haunted the beatnik bars of Greenwich Village during his days as a young professor at Columbia University, before Yale lured him away in 1956.

The professor ambled in shortly after 2. In his mid-60s at the time, his lank, dark hair carelessly combed, Black sat down behind his desk and in an easy Texas drawl began a discussion, not about poetry or Icelandic sagas, but about the intricacies of admiralty law, the law of the sea. The Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Charles L. Black, Jr., was one of the nation’s recognized authorities on the subject. He also was a scholar of constitutional law and of impeachment, and, in the words of a colleague, “the only certified genius at the Yale Law School.”

I remember how easy-going he was with his students and they with him. I’d never been in a law school class, and I was expecting, I suppose, a real-life version of the imperious Harvard Law professor played by John Houseman in “The Paper Chase.” That had never been his style, Black told me. “If my students are smart enough to get in here,” he said, “I consider it my responsibility to help them get the most out of the experience.”

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Here’s how a former student put it: “Charles Black could say something to you – even though you had just said the dumbest thing in the universe – in a way that........

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