Former Faculty Member Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. Dies at 88

Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., a leading scholar of legal ethics and former Yale Law School faculty member, died on January 10, 2018. He began teaching at Yale Law School in 1971, and was appointed Sterling Professor of Law in 1986, retiring from full-time teaching at the Law School in 1994. He served as acting dean of Yale SOM from 1980 to 1981 and recently was the Trustee Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Miller Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. From 1984 to 1999, he was the director of the American Law Institute.

“Geoff Hazard was a leading scholar and teacher in the fields of civil procedure and legal ethics,” said Dean Heather Gerken. “He is widely revered for his contribution to Yale Law School and his impact on students during his years on the faculty. Our community is in mourning, and he will be sorely missed.”

According to Penn Law School, Hazard coauthored leading treatises and casebooks on civil procedure – Civil Procedure (6th ed. forthcoming 2018, with John Leubsdorf & Debra Lyn Bassett); Pleading and Procedure: Cases and Materials (11th ed. 2015, with William A. Fletcher, Stephen McG. Bundy, & Andrew D. Bradt) – and professional ethics – The Law of Lawyering (4th ed. 2015, with W. William Hodes & Peter R. Jarvis); The Law and Ethics of Lawyering (6th ed. 2017, with Susan P. Koniak, Roger C. Cramton, George M. Cohen, & W. Bradley Wendel). His other writings spanned a broad range of topics, including civil procedure for international commercial disputes; joinder, including class actions and discovery; and legal ethics, particularly comparing the ethics practices of lawyers in modern industrialized nations.

Raised in Kirkwood, Missouri, Hazard graduated from Swarthmore College in 1953, and, in 1954, he received his LLB from Columbia University, where he served on the Columbia Law Review.

He is survived by his wife Elizabeth O'Hara Hazard, three children from his first marriage to Barbara Jackson Hazard and six from his second marriage, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.