The Law School Mourns Barry Schaller ’63, 1938–2017

The Honorable Barry R. Schaller, retired Associate Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court and expert on issues of legal ethics, bioethics, and public policy, died Saturday, September 9, 2017. He was 78 and had suffered from a rare form of leukemia.

Schaller served on the Connecticut Supreme Court from 2007–2008 and was a judge on the Connecticut Appellate Court from 1992 to 2007. Before that, he was a trial judge for 18 years. Schaller was a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. In 1974, Schaller, 35, became the youngest judge to serve on a state court. It was in that role, in the 1980s, that he presided over one of the state’s most complex cases of civil litigation when he heard arguments in the trial of Colonial Realty.

In addition to his work on the bench, Schaller served for many years as a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School teaching Appellate Law, and taught at Trinity, Wesleyan, and Quinnipiac. In 2008, Quinnipiac awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

He had an abiding interest in bioethics and served on committees addressing medical ethics concerns at both Middlesex Hospital in Middletown and Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford. This work inspired Schaller’s book, Understanding Bioethics and Law, which was published in 2007. Similarly, his work at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, addressing the psychological challenges posed to those who had experienced the rigors of combat, led to Veterans on Trial in 2012. In 2016, Schaller published his first novel, The Ramadi Affair, and he completed another work of fiction, Flight from Aleppo, which will be published posthumously.

Schaller is survived by his wife of 38 years, Carol Schaller; seven children; sixteen grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held at Battell Chapel at Yale on Sunday, September 24, at 3:00 p.m. A Memorial Celebration and reception will follow in the Yale Law School Derald H. Ruttenberg Dining Hall.