Clark Byse, 95; taught law at BU, Columbia, Harvard

With several students from the final class he had taught in the audience, Clark Byse spoke several years ago at a Boston University Law Review banquet and ruminated about a teaching career that began in the Midwest and reached the heights of Harvard Law School.

"Just as there is something special about one's last class," he said in April 2002, "there also is something special about one's first class."

In 1939, as a youthful 27-year-old, he stepped to the lectern of a law school classroom in Iowa and spied in the front row a fellow he had met a few days earlier: the counterman from the local drugstore. During that encounter, Dr. Byse had asked for a Danish. The counterman displayed it to the customer he didn't know would soon be his professor and impudently asked, "This one, kid?"

A graying eminence decades later, no longer a "kid" by any measure, Dr. Byse was honored for his distinguished teaching by the law schools at BU, Columbia University, and Harvard University, where he joined the faculty in 1957 and was professor emeritus. He died in the Brookhaven at Lexington retirement community Oct. 9, not long after suffering a stroke. Dr. Byse was 95.

"Often when a professor dies, everyone says he was 'a masterful teacher,' " said Daniel Meltzer, a professor at Harvard Law School. "Well, Clark really was a masterful teacher. He was a very demanding teacher, and the demands he made really developed students' skills in a way that was not surpassed. He personified the soul of the institution."

Honing the minds of his charges during semesters that left lasting impressions, Dr. Byse taught future US Supreme Court justices and those who would follow his own path to the front of the classroom in law schools across the country. Dr. Byse, colleagues said, used the Socratic method of questions and debate to elicit insights and steer students away from merely repeating what he and the day's textbook might say.

"I think he was simply a model Harvard Law School teacher," said Lloyd Weinreb, Dane Professor of law at the school and a former student of Dr. Byse. "He did his job, attended very much to it, and became one of the law school's great teachers."

Among Dr. Byse's students in contracts and administrative law classes were Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter, both of whom are now justices on the US Supreme Court. By e-mail, an assistant to Souter passed along a contribution the justice had made to a book of reminiscences collected five years ago for Dr. Byse's 90th birthday.

"The best things Clark Byse taught his contracts class the year I was in it were not confined to contracts," Souter wrote. "He pointed out, for example, that magicians are able to pull rabbits out of hats because they put the rabbits into the hats first. Reminding us of this from time to time was a lovely way to call attention to circular reasoning. When some confident student's answer to a Byse hypo simply begged the question, the professor would go to the blackboard and slowly draw a top hat. Then he would draw two pointed, furry ears sticking up above the rim, and that would be that."

The odyssey from a childhood in Oshkosh, Wis., to a storied teaching career in Cambridge was something even Dr. Byse found quite marvelous.

"As he grew older, in his last dozen or so years, he said often how lucky he was," Weinreb recalled. "He said, 'Just imagine a boy from Oshkosh who went to a teacher's college finding himself at Harvard Law School.' "

When he graduated from high school in Oshkosh, Dr. Byse didn't immediately go to college, though he longed to be a teacher. Instead, he spent a year working for his father and uncles on a mink and fox farm in Finland, a small town just inland from Lake Superior in northern Minnesota. He graduated in 1935 from Oshkosh State Teachers College and at the behest of his father, who didn't want him to be a teacher, went to the University of Wisconsin Law School.

He became a teacher, anyway, working first at the University of Iowa College of Law. Dr. Byse left to serve in the Navy during World War II, then spent a year in Washington with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1946, moved to Harvard 11 years later, and later received a doctorate from Columbia University.

Dr. Byse became professor emeritus at Harvard in 1983, then taught at BU until 2000 as a visiting professor.

Bernard Wolfman, Fessenden Professor of law emeritus at Harvard Law School, was a first year law student at Penn when he took Dr. Byse's contract law class.

"I thought he was terrific," Wolfman said. "He was traditional in that he used the Socratic method of teaching, and he did it very effectively. Some people saw him as sort of a tough guy in class - and he was, in class. But as a human being and a person he could not have been a more congenial, a more emphatic, more sympathetic person to get to know."

Dr. Byse "had a gentle and kind nature behind the tough exterior," said his daughter, Barbara, of West Newton.

He would visit students and colleagues when they were ill, colleagues said, and he cared as deeply about encouraging his students to live and enjoy life as he did teaching them to think like lawyers.

While studying at the University of Wisconsin, he met and married Helen Scott, and they had two children. She died in the mid-1970s.

A fisherman from childhood, Dr. Byse would retreat from Harvard to lakes in northern Maine and Canada, and more recently to Big Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where he fished into his 90s.

"Our vacations always involved a lake and a boat and sitting in the boat with my father having many wonderful talks," his daughter said. "That's the piece of him that a lot of people didn't see."

Rather than devote off-hours to lucrative consulting work, Dr. Byse was active with the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors, which he led as president for two years in the mid-1960s. Academic freedom, he believed, should be rigorously defended.

"The justification of academic freedom is essentially the same as that of the provisions in the Bill of Rights forbidding governmental interference with the citizen's general freedoms of thought and expression," he wrote in the Globe in April 1963.

Dr. Byse taught so many students at Harvard that his became a name worth dropping. In the 1994 movie "Quiz Show," the character portraying Richard Goodwin, who now lives in Concord, establishes his intellectual bona fides in one scene by mentioning that he had taken Dr. Byse's contract law class.

Months after the movie was released, Elizabeth Myers was living in a village in Mexico and was watching the movie at the local library when she heard Dr. Byse's name. The two had met in Panama during World War II when he was stationed there in the Navy, and she was working as a translator. Intrigued, she sent a letter to the Harvard professor.

"I said, 'Are you by any chance the same Clark Byse I knew 50 years ago in Panama?' He wrote back, and we started corresponding," she said, and they married in 1997.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Dr. Byse leaves a son, James, of Port Angeles, Wash.

A service will be announced.