I see David fishing with me on our lake in Northern Wisconsin, where he and Rhoda would visit for a few days in the summers.  David is befuddled by the lures and by casting, but appearing to enjoy himself.

 David hated fishing.

 He was there because I loved fishing.

 I think of arriving at the law school at 6:30 in the morning, before my 8:00 class, and passing his office and hearing his “Hi-Ho! ... coffee?”  We would then gather, David and me and Sam Fahr, for fresh coffee and friendship and conversation to start each day.

 I remember David stopping by his secretary, Diana DeWalle’s office each evening before he left, speaking with her briefly, making sure she knew how important she was to him.

 David thought of his office as a storage depot, a place to pile things on the desk, the floor, and every other available space.  The bigger the office, the greater the capacity for storage.

 David hated to clean his office.  There was only one thing he hated more.  Grading exams.  So each winter and spring, after David’s exams were given and his bluebooks were delivered, David turned  to anything and everything except grading.  And when he ran out of things to do, he turned, as a last ditch effort, to cleaning his office, with Diana’s help.  The day after his office had been organized and made spotless, I would see David sitting there amidst the orderliness, despondent.  It was finally time to turn to the bluebooks.

 A joy of David’s life was friends and food.  Most every day the gang from the law school would leave promptly at 11:30 to go to the Pumpernickel, Ron Ameche’s restaurant in Coralville.  This would often be announced amidst moans and cries of despair from those who wished for a restaurant that served lettuce, or fruit, or skim milk, or any kind of healthy food.  But in the end we all went with David to the Pumpernickel, where he would see his dear friend, Ron, and his large circle of friends from around the University and the city.

 David inspired us to be better than our selfish instincts.   A faculty, he believed,  must always ask what should be done, what is the right thing to do, not what is convenient or easy or personally satisfying.  This is manifested most starkly in David’s legacy to the Iowa Law School, the first year writing program, an idea whose simple rightness was so powerful that the faculty undertook to devote its own energies, student by student, to the time consuming, sometimes even gruesome, job of teaching students to think and express themselves in the unforgiving medium of the written word.  This was an idea so powerful that virtually every other law school in the country now attempts it, but because of David’s inspiration, Iowa remains singular, as one of the only law schools with the commitment to staff the program by faculty, alone.

 David believed in faculty self-governance, but he also knew that a faculty must operate by consent, that a faculty’s burden cannot be lifted by a rule.  We continue to this day to respect David’s insight through the Vernon rule of faculty hiring, which is that once a candidate receives enough votes to hire under the rules, the faculty must then step back, without the assistance of rules, and consider whether there is sufficiently broad enthusiasm to go forward.  For David, such simple acts of mutual respect and commitment to our common aims are matters of the heart that cannot be reduced to a rule .

 David was a great teacher - great in all the notable, yet somehow conventional, ways.  David was also a magical teacher.  He believed in the simple truth that we do not teach by telling or instructing or professing, but by cajoling and pushing and inspiring and inciting and demanding and caring.  He was the last of the teachers to require first year law students to stand when answering questions in class.   David would demand much of them, often gruffly.  He has been known to say (with a twinkle in his eye) after a student explained a case in response to David’s question: “That was very artfully put, Mr. Jones, but it could have been improved upon were it somehow relevant to the case we are studying.”

 The students, of course, saw through David in a minute.  Beneath that gruff exterior was an old softie who cared deeply about what he was doing and about each and every one of them.  How many times I have walked past his office, glancing in, only to see seven or eight students sitting around him, some on the floor, some on chairs, some leaning against the bookshelves, talking -- caring for him as much as he cared for them.

 Of course we all know that David had an independent streak.  How many of us remember dinner parties at the Vernon’s with Rhoda and David, when after great food we settled in around the table to enjoy coffee, wine, and good conversation, only to see David rising as the clock tolled ten, announcing that he was going to bed, but that we should feel free to stay and enjoy ourselves as long as we wanted.  He always went.  We often stayed.

 And we remember David’s wry, self-deprecating sense of humor.   He once described how he wrote his articles.  He would, he said, think about an idea and then write it straight out, from beginning to end.  He would then turn to the cases to see if there was any support for his idea.  Often there wasn’t, but that didn’t stop him.  All he had to do, he said, “was add a bunch of nots.”

 I wish I could add just one “not” today.

 But I can’t.

 I shall miss him terribly.  He was my teacher, my mentor, my colleague, my best friend.

 We all will miss him.

 But signs of David - his friendship, his patience, his call for us to transcend ourselves, to imagine what education can really be - these signs and more are all about us.  I hope that they will always be so.