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Constitutional Interpretation

Justice Elena Kagan on the Late, Great Prof. Richard Fallon

Eugene Volokh | 8.13.2026 4:18 PM

From the Harvard Law Review (thanks to Prof. Richard Re for the pointer):

Forty years ago, I walked into Dick Fallon's Fed Courts class in the now-demolished wing of Pound Hall. Dick was young—only 33. It was his third year teaching at Harvard Law School. It was his third time teaching Fed Courts. But even then, more students than he could possibly teach sought out his class because they had heard it would make them better thinkers and lawyers. I took many wonderful classes and had many wonderful teachers at HLS. But if forced to pick just one—as the most rigorous, most challenging, and most exciting—I'd pick Fallon on Fed Courts.

I'm not sure I'd have guessed that on the first day. Dick didn't have an enormous classroom presence. He certainly wasn't a Kingsfield-type. He was as unfailingly kind—even gentle—inside the classroom as he was outside of it.

And yet he had the highest of standards—for both his students and the law. He treated every issue in Fed Courts as a kind of mystery: What explained how a given doctrine had developed? What was its purpose, and how did it work? Did it accomplish its objectives, and were its objectives worth accomplishing at all? Every question was hard, every follow-up still harder. Dick demanded more analytic precision, more clarity of thought than any teacher had asked of me before. Time and again, when he called on me, my answers sooner or later came up short. And it was the most thrilling experience I ever had in a classroom.

In the middle of that semester, Dick asked me and Carol Steiker (also one of Dick's later colleagues at HLS) to do some........

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