My friend Ethan

This is not a post about politics or law. It is personal, a remembrance of a friend who died last night.

Ethan Posner and I went to law school together, at the University of Michigan. We started in the fall of 1986. Ethan was an east coast guy who found himself in the midwest for law school. Ethan was a big person, physically and personality-wise. He was smart, articulate, and willing to speak up right from the get go. He stood out.

I got to know Ethan especially well when a classmate of ours enlisted him, our friend Jonathan Foot, and me for a study group in the first semester. We would come with our outlines prepared, and spend hours debating hypotheticals, continuing discussions from class and from meals in the dining hall. Ethan would sometime resort to picking me up and turning me upside down. As I told him, I took this as conclusive proof that my arguments had defeated him.

Only Ethan could pick me up, turn me upside down, and leave me feeling respected and loved.

Ethan was a worker and striver. In law school, this took the form of dedicated study. In our first year, we both spent a lot of time in the law library. Every once in a while, Ethan would come find me, for a heart-to-heart. We'd sit on the floor leaning against one of the slanting walls. He might talk about his love life or his fears that it was only luck that he'd done well in his first-semester and that he wasn't sure he knew how to do it again. This side of Ethan, the person who could talk openly about these quieter feelings, wasn't perhaps as widely known to our classmates as say, his love for New York City. That he shared those quieter feelings with me and listened to my own brought depth and endurance to our friendship, in all the years we knew each other.

Ethan had a terrific sense of humor. As I'm thinking of it, I can hear his laugh and a certain wry tone of voice he had. He could handle being teased and often had the last word even at his own expense. Ethan often made the sharpest observations about the world couched in a quip. He made me laugh.

When Ethan thought highly of somebody, he was free with his praise. From the time he met Stephanie, the person he married, and for the rest of his life, Ethan spoke of her with love and respect. He remarked on her good sense, her talents in her professional life, her abilities as a parent. When Ethan fell ill with cancer and was undergoing treatment, he told me that he was amazed by Stephanie all over again. He said he would not have been able to grapple with any of it had it not been for her.

In the fall of our first year at law school, my baseball team, the New York Mets, won the World Series. I was riveted through the playoffs and the championships. Ethan, an ardent and devout Yankees fan, was one of the very few who understood how I felt. I remember him smiling at me after the Mets triumphed.

Ethan's smile, his zest for everything he did, his appreciation and enjoyment of those he cared about, his grit and hard work, his passion for law and history – all these made him special. He stood out, as he always will in my memory and in my heart.