EULOGY: PASSIONATE ADVOCATE

A year ago, knowing he was dying, Arthur Liman told me he wanted to write about his life as a lawyer. He had a notion that he could inspire young lawyers to regard our profession as he did–a way to serve the public interest. Arthur was worried that publishers wanted something else–gossip, indiscretions, boasts. He knew so many important people, had handled so many famous cases, that such a book could have been a best seller. But he was steadfast. “I won’t do a book like that,” he would say. He was too loyal to his clients to tell tales, too genuinely humble to brag and too idealistic to believe celebrity defined a successful legal career.

He was shambly, unglamorous, sentimental, tolerant, fair and liberal. People thought he had a bad haircut, and he knew it: he once said he was the only person whose hair had been improved by chemotherapy. He could seem self-absorbed, but in fact he loved being a mentor. Two years ago, Arthur asked for my help in setting up an office to defend poor New Yorkers facing the death penalty, and I saw him at his finest, doing the civic lawyering he loved no less than his monumental dealmaking. Even as his illness advanced, the only thing that made him sad, I think, was the unfinished task of calling lawyers back to the ideals he lived by and believed in.

–Peter Sistrom