This is the last thing he sent me, just over a year ago: KSJLPPessay.
The final two paragraphs of this published talk he gave are as good a summation of anything he wrote, and a wonderful description of his legacy for me:
Ultimately, the scholarly enterprise in law cannot simply be bound up with law reform. Whatever the law is at a given time, the goal of the scholarly enterprise must be, at least in part, to transcend doctrinal issues and try to help legal institutions better understand the nature, effects, and limits of law. Legal scholarship is a subpart of scholarship in general, and one goal of scholarship in general is to improve our knowledge about the world. The larger, non-Indian community simply does not know very much about tribal institutions and law. And what they don’t know tends not to hurt the larger community, but instead, to hurt tribes.
When someone in the dominant legal community asks me where I am from, and I say Oberlin, Kansas, that no doubt conjures up a variety of images, some positive, some negative, but almost certainly evokes no strong feelings about the system of justice in such rural communities. So, too, would be the case for my cartoon figure who claims to be from Cleveland, though not from Cleveland anymore. But if the response were that the person is from, say, the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation – the place where the Plains Commerce Bank case arose and was litigated – I think more than a few members of the dominant legal community may well conjure up negative images of the system of justice found there. And that, at least as much as the dry legal rules in books, should be a matter of significant concern for all of us. The people in this room, at least by and large, probably reject those negative images. I think that it is time we did something about documenting who is right, on the whole, and in what varied circumstances – the dominant community, or the rest of us.
Turtle Talk 
RIP.
Phil Frickey was an amazing professor and I was fortunate to have him as a mentor and friend at Boalt.
He opened the world of Indian law and legislative analysis to me, and I will miss him dearly. The last time I spoke to him was in May, and he said his illness and the side effects of his treatment were taking their toll on him. I hope he can rest peacefully now, and that his family knows just how much his life impacted the rest of us.
Bye, Professor Frickey.
— Will Trachman
Philip P. Frickey — A Life in the Law
July 13, 2010
tags: constitutional law, Philip Frickey, Indiana Law, statutory interpretationby Dan Farber
Phil Frickey, 1953-2010.
I am sad beyond words to have to report the death of my friend and colleague Phil Frickey. His death is a great loss to Berkeley and the legal academy more generally. In terms of his scholarship, Phil was a major figure in constitutional law, but was probably best known among legal academics for his work on theories of statutory interpretation. His casebook with Bill Eskridge is commonly considered to have created the modern field of Legislation scholarship. He was also perhaps the nation’s leading authority on Indian Law. Although he did not write directly on environmental law, his work in all three of these fields was directly relevant to environmental issues.
Phil was also a great institutional citizen. He was responsible for hiring most of Berkeley’s current junior faculty in his time as chair of the Appointments Committee, and he spent many hours mentoring and advising them. At his Festschrift, a dozen members of the junior faculty performed a song they had written in his honor. He also showed similar dedication as a teacher, and there has been an outpouring of student sentiment on “Nuts and Boalts,” the student blog. An issue of the California Law Review focusing on his scholarship is now in press.
Phil and I both taught at the University of Minnesota before coming here, so I knew him from the time he became a law professor. I’ve never known anyone whose judgment was so highly respected by his colleagues. To say he will be greatly missed is an understatement.
Phil grew up across the street from my grandparents’ house in Oberlin, Kansas. I attended school with him, from the seventh grade through high school. We were roommates at the University of Kansas for two years.
Phil always had a quick mind. He never had an aversion to hard work. It seems to me that he also had a generous dose of grounding in the “real world” perhaps partly due to working part time in the Farmers National Bank with his father. Add the fact that Phil really liked people and the result was the man that are now so dearly missing.
I was so lucky to have known him.
L. Mockry
Lawrence, KS