Philip P. Frickey

Phil Frickey Obituary

Matthew L.M. Fletcher4 Comments

PHILIP P. FRICKEY

Kansas native Philip P. Frickey, a professor at University of California Berkeley and one of the nation’s foremost experts on public law and federal Indian law and policy, died Sunday, July 11. He was 57.

A law school professor for 27 years, Frickey was the co-author of popular casebooks on legislation, constitutional law, and Indian law. He also volunteered his skills outside the scholastic arena—working with the Native American Rights Fund and National Congress of American Indians—and writing amicus briefs on their behalf in U.S. Supreme Court cases.

“I’ve never known anyone whose judgment was so highly respected by his colleagues,” said Berkeley Law Professor Dan Farber, who co-authored two books and eight articles with Frickey and called him “the nation’s leading authority on Indian Law.”

Frickey, whose career path was influenced by a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, started his teaching career at University of Kansas Law School. He came to Berkeley Law in 2000 after 17 years at the University of Minnesota Law School. In addition to his scholastic and teaching achievements, Frickey chaired Berkeley Law’s faculty appointments committee.

A full-day symposium to celebrate Frickey’s scholarship and teaching was held at Berkeley Law on April 24, 2009. The event drew top academics from across the country; papers from the event will soon be published in a special issue of the California Law Review. At that time, two student funds at Berkeley were created in Frickey’s honor, and a fund in his honor also was established with Kansas University Endowment Association to support the Tribal Law and Government Program at University of Kansas Law School.

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Phil Frickey Walks On

Matthew L.M. Fletcher4 Comments

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.