James D. Cox

LEVI IN PRINTER FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 11/28/2016 9:50 AM Duke Law Journal VOLUME 66 DECEMBER 2016 NUMBER 3 Foreword JAMES D. COX DAVID F. LEVI† This is a love story. For almost 40 years, Jim and Duke have loved each other with a mutual dedication and admiration that has brought each one of them into a higher plane of being. Not that the relationship has been at all fair or balanced. This is because Jim has never asked much of his partner over the years. But the reverse has not been true. Between the University and the Law School, Duke has been a demanding, one might say insatiable, institutional spouse, always ready with new burdens and assignments for Jim. And Jim has always responded cheerfully and without complaint. The list of important Law School and University committees that he has chaired over the years is astonishing. Even so, Jim would be the first to say that he has received a great deal from Duke—terrific colleagues and students, a platform for his scholarship and teaching, a wonderful community to raise his family, and where his human spouse, Ellen, or Bonnie, as she is known, could fulfill her own aspirations, and a place where his extraordinary range of talents could find an outlet in institutional service and in many other ways and venues. The courtship began in 1977. Jim was on the faculty at Hastings, where he went to Law School, and there was a building buzz about him. He had visited at Stanford in the previous year and had been a smashing success. Keith Mann, the academic dean at Stanford, wrote to the Duke Dean Walter Dellinger that Jim’s teaching had earned him Copyright © 2016 David F. Levi. † Dean and Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law. These remarks were delivered at the Institute for Law and Economic Policy Symposium, Vindicating Virtuous Claims, held on April 7–8, 2016 in Miami Beach, Florida. LEVI IN PRINTER FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 11/28/2016 9:50 AM 460 [Vol. 66:459 DUKE LAW JOURNAL the Award for Teaching Excellence, given by students, and that this had not been a fluke or a mere popularity contest. According to Dean Mann: “With respect to teaching, Jim is viewed as not simply satisfactory, or even upper quartile, but of star quality.” How right that view and prediction proved to be! Dean Mann also noted that Jim was producing important scholarship, in particular, his article on Ernst & Ernst v. Hochfelder1 was much admired. In those days, the dean had a much freer hand. Upon receiving the letter from Stanford, Walter apparently detailed Professor John Weistart to “make it so.” There was an exchange of phone calls and correspondence. In a lengthy letter to Professor Weistart, detailing his pending research and writing projects and his many teaching interests, Jim ended by emphasizing that this was also a family decision: “John, . . . we are interested in a relocation which will offer Ellen and [me] both a meaningful and productive academic future.” Walter Dellinger informed the faculty that he had invited Jim to visit Duke for the spring semester of the 1978–79 academic year. The two sides of the impending union apparently liked what they saw because on July 1, 1979, Jim Cox became a Professor of Law at Duke, and Bonnie simultaneously joined the faculty of what in two years would be the Fuqua School of Business. Here we are 36 years later and still together, still going strong. What a marvelous University and Law School citizen Jim has been. He does it all. He is a leader, a worker-bee, a go-to guy. He takes on the tough assignments—whether it is mentoring a junior colleague who needs help or designing responsible investment policies for the University. He astutely figures out how he can best play a constructive role whether it is to help develop consensus or to be the devil’s advocate in the room. All the ways one can describe a person invaluable to an institution fit Jim. But it is in the interaction with his Law School colleagues and his students where Jim particularly shines and has made the critical difference in the lives of others. Jim is a superb colleague. For one thing, he is really accomplished. He just knows a lot. He has strong empirical and quantitative skills, and he has an understanding of markets and securities law that few can match. Add to this an inquiring, nimble mind and an incredible work ethic, and you have one of the foremost scholars of our time. 1. James D. Cox, Ernst & Ernst v. Hochfelder: A Critique and an Evaluation of Its Impact upon the Scheme of the Federal Securities Laws, 28 HASTINGS L.J. 569 (1977). LEVI IN PRINTER FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 2016] 11/28/2016 9:50 AM JAMES D. COX 461 Of course, one can be a great scholar and not a great colleague. This is not Jim Cox, however. His natural curiosity and gregariousness, his enthusiasm for learning and helping are such that he eagerly participates in the work of others, whether students or faculty, offering insights in a spirit of mutual inquiry. Somewhere along the line, Jim learned or understood that egotism and self-importance are not synonymous with influence and consequence. In the academic setting, many ascribe to egalitarianism while seeking status and hierarchy. Not our Jim. He is neither impressed by academic baubles or rankings or self-regard, nor does he rely on his considerable past accomplishments to claim the privileges of rank. Because Jim is so broadly gauged, he is at home not only in the academic world but in the world of judges, regulators, and lawyers. Perhaps this is one reason his work is so widely read and has had such effect. Lawrence Baxter on our faculty notes how humbling it was to go to Washington D.C. with Jim when the two of them were teaching in our Duke in D.C. program. Lawrence notes: Jim’s prestige as a securities lawyer is legendary. This was brought vividly home to me when I would visit the SEC with Jim as part of our inspections for the Duke in D.C. course: young securities regulators there would quite literally come out of their offices to stop him in the hallway and tell him how much they wanted to meet him, that they had learned everything they knew in the field from professors who used his casebooks, and how much they admired him. Jim is not just an intellectual guide, mentor, and interlocutor— challenging us all to do better—but he is also a true and caring friend, what some of us would call a mensch. This emerges in the metaphors that faculty use to describe him. He is always there, according to Professor DeMott, “The Rock of Gibraltar, and mixing metaphors, the anchor of our strengths.” Kate Bartlett harkens to the European bike trips that Jim and Bonnie have been organizing for faculty and friends over the past several years. According to Kate, Jim is the “sweeper,” “staying in the back and making sure everyone else is ahead of him so that no one who might break down or otherwise need help will get inadvertently left behind.” As the “sweeper,” Jim is our quiet community ca (...truncated)