This is interview number 14 for the Raymond Goetz Oral History Project.
Please tell me who you are.
Hi, I'm Sid Shapiro.
You're talking to me from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and I'm a law professor at Wake
Forest University.
Thank you.
Before you were at Wake Forest, you were a professor at KU, and when did you start at
KU?
I started in 1976, and I was there for, I believe, something like 24 years, so a long
time.
Who was dean when you started at KU's law school?
I think it was Martin Dickinson, if I'm remembering correctly.
That was my guess.
We'll get to something.
You've stumped me already.
Well, it becomes important later.
We can look it up, yeah.
When you started at KU, what courses did you teach?
Well, this is very important in terms of Ray, because he and I were the contracts teachers.
I teach administrative law.
I had been working in Washington with administrative agencies, and the deal was to come on the
faculty.
I also had to teach a first year course, and they wanted me to teach contracts.
So Ray and I, for a very long time, were the two contracts teachers.
Great.
Do you recall your first meeting of Ray?
What I recall is this, and it's probably not the first meeting, but I had a series of wonderful
interactions with him probably my first four, five years.
They started at the end of, nearly the end of the first semester when I had to give my
very first ever law school exam.
And Gatz took me under his wing, and I remember that he suggested, well, why don't we do a
joint exam?
You write a question, I'll write a question, and we'll get an exam together.
So I wrote the question, and I gave it to Ray, and he said, where's the answer?
And I said, what do you mean?
And he said, well, the thing about writing these questions is it's very important to
also write out the answer, because that's where you see where the exam question went
wrong.
It's where you might paint the students in a corner.
It teaches you you've left out some central fact.
It may teach you that the question is too long and too complicated.
And he was right about that.
It's a lesson that I followed ever since to this day, and I've been doing this a long
time.
I answer every one of my exam questions ahead of time and often then change the exam to
a considerable extent because of that mentoring.
In any case, I went back and wrote the answer and I gave it to Ray.
And he said, oh, that's really very interesting.
But I'm so excited about the three questions that I'm asking.
Why don't we just use my exam?
And I went home and thought, yeah, it's not a very good question.
So the spring comes, I write a question, same result.
It's a guest exam.
And it wasn't until the third or fourth or fifth semester teaching, maybe more, that
I finally got a question on Ray's exam.
And they were raised exams.
And I was so proud of myself.
I had finally written a question that Matt Ray gets his professional standards as a
professor on the exam.
And that was a highlight.
All this came to a head the year before I went up for 10 years.
So this is my fifth year going into my sixth year.
And I meet with Ray as usual, probably in November for the December exam.
And he says, we caught a break.
My son-in-law is at the Columbia Law School and he's taking contracts from Alan Farnsworth,
who was the author, one of the authors of our casebook.
So it gets suggested instead of sitting on writing an exam, which is a lot of work, we
probably can use Farnsworth's exam.
And, you know, just doctor it up a little bit.
And this is, you know, pre-internet.
This is pre-computer even.
So the odds that any of the Kansas students would have seen this exam were practically
nil. In any case, we would change a couple of the answers just to catch anybody to who
might have goofed this up.
So apropos of Ray's mantra, I think it's a very interesting example.
Mantra, I went home to answer a couple of the questions on the Farnsworth exam so we
could test them out.
And I couldn't figure out the answer.
I couldn't figure out what what Farnsworth was testing, even same book, by the way, same
course. And I had a hell of a time with the exam.
So now I got to go tell the senior member of the faculty and the year just before I'm
going up for tenure, I can't even answer a contracts exam written by another professor
at Columbia now in my fifth year of teaching.
So Monday comes along and I'm dreading this meeting and I find Ray in his office and I
go in and I'm about to admit that I can't do it.
I can't answer this question.
And Ray turns to me says, when the hell is Alan Farnsworth teaching?
I can't answer his question.
And I don't know that I've ever been more relieved in my life than when Gets admitted
that he couldn't answer the question.
Yeah.
When when you first started this with Ray, you know, discussing how the exam would be,
what was your initial impression when he said, well, just let's go with my exam?
Oh, my initial impression was that he was better at this.
He was more experienced writing exams is an art form.
And while I'm sure my exam would have worked, it wouldn't have tested as objectively
as I think probably raise example would.
He had another he had a couple more bugaboos.
He would save clippings from the newspaper of odd events.
You may remember an exam that you took that had some odd event.
A few of his and but he always put in this is from a newspaper.
He didn't want students accusing us of making up this really weird set of facts.
This had actually happened to someone and some lawyer was actually having to sort this out.
In a way that, you know, it was just a mess.
So we always put in the newspaper clipping and what newspaper came from what state.
What was your mentoring relationship with him like?
I mean, how how was he just personally and professionally with you as a mentor?
Well, I've always thought of him as the ultimate professional.
He he came to the law school late, as I'm sure you know from your other interviews.
He had been a longtime partner in Chicago law firm.
He was a very experienced lawyer.
He's very experienced with contracts.
And all that was a tremendous advantage for me because remember, I'm an administrative lawyer.
I remember it dawned on me maybe my second year of teaching that I'd never even written a contract
ever. And here I am teaching these four students contracts.
So I considered him very generous in his time and with me and my questions about contracts.
Because I really was not only a rookie, I was really a fully inexperienced rookie.
Where did you spend your time talking to him?
His office is what I recall.
I also know and I can think of several occasions where Ray and his wife, you'll have to remind
me of Ray's wife, Joyce and I were trying to remember it the other day.
Oh, she went by Moe.
Forget what her name actually was.
I think that was based on her maiden name.
Yeah, I was telling Joe or Joyce about this and she said, oh, tell them about the dinners.
That was fun.
So Ray and Moe often had faculty in their house and they
entertained wonderfully.
When you went to the Getz house, which was huge because they had a lot of kids in a big house,
and the kids were gone by then, but they were great patrons of the art.
And Avangard art was the thing that I remember a couple of neon sculptures.
Art was the thing that I remember a couple of neon sculptures in particular.
And they were always proud to show off their next purchase.
And as someone who didn't at that time know particularly much about art,
it was kind of impressive.
But as soon as you walked in, Ray would offer you a beer.
And there was a brand of beer from probably Wisconsin.
I can't remember where it was brewed called Getz Beer.
And Ray exclusively served Getz Beer at his house.
I don't remember drinking anything else but Getz Beer.
I'm sure we had wine, but it was always Getz Beer.
Yeah, I actually lived around the corner from the Getz house.
I was never in it.
By the time I was in law school, he wasn't having students over.
I understand now that he did that at one point.
But how often did he entertain faculty?
I just can't remember.
But often enough, I can remember multiple occasions over the years visiting at his house.
At some point, fairly early in my career, he retired.
So it became less often then.
And I probably saw him less after he retired.
But yeah, he was a...
They were very generous and interesting entertainers.
Yeah.
Anything about it that you remember in particular?
Anything about it that you remember in particular about their entertaining at their home?
Just the artwork.
And it seemed to me, I'm sure it wasn't true, that when they bought a new piece,
it was always an occasion to have people over and show it off.
Do you happen to recall what other than contracts, what Ray and Labor law...
He occasionally taught some other courses.
Do you know when you started whether he was teaching anything other than Labor law and contracts?
I just don't remember, but he was the Labor law teacher.
So contracts was a two semester course and we both taught it both semesters.
So a typical load of a law professor is four.
And so that would leave him with two other courses.
And there was a Labor law course, a kind of survey course.
And then I just don't recall what his other course was.
Okay.
Yeah.
By the time I started, he had taken...
He was in phased retirement, so he was only teaching in the fall.
So he didn't have that second semester.
When you joined, though, as you said,
he was still teaching full-time.
And he also had, by that time, a thriving arbitration practice on the side.
Were you aware of that?
I was aware because he made it known to probably a fair number of people in the law school
that he had to learn lots of stuff about baseball very quickly.
He didn't follow baseball.
He wasn't a baseball fan, but he was being interviewed by the major leagues
to become a baseball arbitrator, which he did.
And he was afraid in the interview, they would ask him questions about baseball
and he wouldn't know anything.
So he entered into a crash reading course.
And then if he found anybody who followed baseball, he would come and ask you questions
about baseball, what was going on, just whatever he could pull together.
Between the time he got the notification for the interview and the interview,
I don't remember how long that was.
Then he went for the interview.
As I said, I'm not sure whether they told him then or afterwards that he got the job.
But he came back and I or others, maybe in a conversation with a group of people,
said, how did it go?
And he said, I think it went pretty well.
And then we said, what did they ask you about baseball?
And he said, nothing.
He said that what they were interested in is my mediation skills and how I operated as a mediator
and the nature of the hearings I hold.
And they were really very interested in that aspect of legal practice
and the one to understand what kind of mediator I would be.
And that's what they were hiring.
That's what they were interested in.
They didn't really care whether I knew anything about baseball.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So were you a baseball fan?
Were you one of the people?
Yeah, not so much that I could probably help him with a lot of details.
But I certainly followed him more than he did.
And then I remember from time to time, he would,
we would know that he took on one of the sort of high level, high profile cases.
And he'd go off to hear this and then eventually a decision would come out.
And so he would even get his name in the papers, at least on the sports page,
because that's the way baseball did salaries then.
And so it was really big news in the sports community.
And some of the arbitrations that he did, mediations,
I can't remember whether it was a mediation or arbitration.
I can't remember what the rules were.
Arbitration.
Yeah, it was an arbitration.
We're pretty high profile.
And then, you know, there'd be a multi-million dollar result
for a pitcher or a really outstanding baseball player.
Yeah. So he was, did he talk about, ever brag, you know, about what a big deal it was that he got
to be the baseball arbitrator?
No, he really didn't.
I mean, Ray was all business.
He was sort of the ultimate lawyer.
And this was a client, so to speak.
I mean, not in a different sense.
And he just went about his job.
And I mean, all I ever remember him saying, because I think I or others probably asked him,
you know, how do you make these decisions?
And he says, they put in evidence.
Of what the players accomplished, statistics, salary of comparable baseball players.
Obviously, the player is asking for more money.
The owner is willing to pay less money.
The two lawyers representing them or agents make arguments for and against why that's the case.
And he said, I just try to judge it.
And I think he was really very good at it because they kept coming back to him.
Right. Did he ever talk to you or others on the faculty about any other aspect of his arbitration practice?
No. Well, I don't know about others, but he didn't.
I don't remember any discussion in any more detail than that.
Did when you were talking, we'll jump back to teaching contracts.
He was a renowned practitioner of the Socratic method.
And I can tell you that students often spoke about his method.
And did you ever talk to him about the Socratic method?
Only in that, what was he aiming to get?
What was he trying to get students to understand?
And Ray approached contracts as maybe being a little more definitive than I ever thought it was.
Often on an exam, in essence, the answer that the student needed to get to was a restatement of contracts,
some number, sub A, B1, or a comment.
And he sort of built out his approach to grading.
And I assume his approach to teaching that way.
You probably have a better idea of that having sat in his class.
And I always thought that there was more leeway there for contracts being a little more
indefinite.
The challenge always is there's uncertainty.
And he didn't write the contract specifically enough.
I just wondered whether he, if you know, whether he was thought about, I guess,
or was concerned about how his Socratic method was perceived by his students.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm not a professor.
I don't know whether professors worry about that kind of thing.
I think it was much more common then.
And I think he probably wasn't the only one in the law school that carried over that model.
I think we, you know, law professors aren't trained in a PhD program.
You don't have a chance to practice on students, if I can put it that way,
and have mentors say, you ought to be doing this, you ought to be doing that.
So when you walk in the first day, what's in your mind is the professors you had.
And I think that's changed over the generations.
And I think I may have been on the cusp of that changing.
So I don't know that he was particularly unique in that regard.
But again, he may have been, he was a little older than even
many of my contemporaries at KU who were sort of hired before me.
Right.
That's only because he came in after having another career.
Right. Yeah.
And I'll get to that here in just one second.
Just, I don't know anything about how law faculties work, I'll tell you.
Was Ray an active participant in the faculty governance or faculty meetings, however it works?
Wow, that's one I just don't remember.
Okay.
It's a good question.
I'm uninformed on it, so it occurred to me, I thought I'd ask.
What was Ray like as a scholar, if you know?
I don't remember much by way of scholarship.
And I think probably at the law school at that time, there wasn't a huge demand
for or as much emphasis on it as developed later.
I think the law school when I first got there saw itself as primarily hiring
hiring people who could teach and work with students.
And that was sort of the number one priority.
And if you occasionally produced some work, that was fine.
But the school for a long time wasn't very demanding, I believe.
It's fair to say in that regard.
Okay.
Were you aware of any of Ray's professional activities?
For instance, he was, I think, the chair or neutral chair
of the collective bargaining committee for the ABA's labor section.
Do you have any information about that?
Well, the one thing I was aware of is when I joined the faculty,
Ray was our lawyer.
So there had been a move by university faculty to organize under the state's
then labor laws applied to public employees.
And that had a several stage process.
And the first stage of the process was to get university faculty recognized as a bargaining unit.
That didn't mean you were unionized or you could bargain collectively.
But the state labor agency, whoever that was, had to declare you to be a unit with common interests.
So that if a union formed, it could bargain for you and it would make sense for everyone
to be in that unit.
And this occurred before I got there.
The law school faculty was concerned about that because
we were generally paid more than many university faculty.
We were a professional school.
Our standards for promotion, tenure, probably rewards were different.
I don't think in that regard we're any different than any other law school in the country, vis-a-vis
the undergraduate and graduate faculty.
It's just a different way and a different system somewhat.
So the faculty were very interested in being declared their own unit for purposes of a vote
if there ever was a vote.
And so Ray was representing the faculty.
And I think he was probably doing it on a pro bono basis, as you'll see as I tell the rest of the story.
So he had on our behalf filed an application before with the regulator that we be declared a separate unit.
And then somewhere during my first year, he announced to the faculty that he was resigning
as our lawyer because the dean was angry with him for having too many consulting arrangements.
And that since we weren't paying him, we were the consulting arrangement easiest to get rid of.
So he dropped us.
And then I remember I had to pay a bill at the end of the year because we hired a lawyer and it was expensive.
So they assessed the entire faculty some amount.
And I think we probably split the cost.
But I was the newest guy and I was paid the least.
And so in the back of my head, I had to say, oh, thanks a lot, Dean.
This has a real cost to me.
So I can't remember when Ray bowed out and when we were declared a separate bargaining unit, but we were.
And then the unionization effort failed.
The undergraduate faculty never moved forward on it.
And so we never moved forward on it either.
That was that.
So before the interview, I actually reviewed the papers on that.
And there are a couple of public papers.
There's a court of appeals decision.
And also the agency is called the Public Employee Relations Board.
There's a perb decision on the unit determination.
And so I didn't know that Ray had been the lawyer and then resigned.
So that's news to me.
So it was probably before all that because his name then wouldn't have been on it.
Right.
So it was before all that occurred.
OK.
And there may be some papers at the perb that would have his name, but I couldn't find them online.
The lawyer you guys hired was John Lungstrom.
Who is also one of my interviewees.
And I didn't know this when I interviewed Judge Lungstrom.
But then the other interesting thing, and I'm just telling you this to see if it rings any bells for you.
So after the court of appeals said what happened was the perb members met in kind of like a star
chamber meeting before their regularly scheduled meeting and discussed this stuff
and overturned their hearing examiner's decision to exclude the law faculty from the overall
university unit determination.
They said no and did it on their own in this, you know, unannounced meeting.
Then the court of appeals reversed it on that violation, the open records, open meetings act violation.
And the idea that it was a due process violation by not giving everybody an opportunity to know that
the hearing examiner had made one decision and now we're doing something else, giving the faculty an
notice and opportunity to be heard.
And then a couple of years or a year or so after the court of appeals decision,
Mike Davis was the university's general counsel at that time and Judge Lungstrom, then of course
lawyer Lungstrom and General Counsel Davis entered into an agreement that excluded the law faculty.
Does that raise any further?
I didn't remember any of that history.
It's fascinating to round out the circle.
As you probably know, Lungstrom came aboard to teach contracts when Ray retired.
Right.
Yeah.
So he and I were the contracts teacher.
Yeah, that's great.
The going back, you mentioned that Ray had many years in practice at Safer Shaw in Chicago
and did his experience as a practicing lawyer distinguish him in any way from other faculty
members, especially since it was a fairly young faculty when you joined.
Yes and no.
I mean, obviously, when one makes that career choice to come in with many more years of practice than
people who are younger and hired younger, but it was always an important aspect at the law school
for almost all of our hires.
I think it was one exception.
I think it was one exception that the person that practiced, as I said, it was a law school that
really did care a lot about teaching and one of the good teachers.
And as the years went by, a growing emphasis on scholarship as well.
But it started as the importance in teaching.
And I don't know whether that was raised direct influence or just by example.
But it did seem obvious to us that you could be of more help to students if you at least
practice for two, three, four years in the area in which you were teaching.
So as we look for new colleagues, that pretty much became a requirement with just one exception.
Yeah.
Do you think that his experience as a practitioner helped him be a mentor to you?
Oh, that's a good question.
I'm sure it did.
But also his experience just in teaching by the time I had met him.
Over time as you teach a course or over time and practice as lawyers learn, you just grasp
my experience and kind of understanding and appreciation for connections
and relationships in the law that you just can't see from a book.
And that knowledge and appreciation just makes you a better teacher.
I think you have to have other kinds of teaching skills.
But it's not something you can really explain, but you just see the law better as the years go on.
See what you can do for clients.
And that translates over for what we do.
You see about how to put a course together and questions you can ask students.
And when students ask you questions, you can connect and see connections and help them
in a way that you wouldn't otherwise.
It has to be the case that Ray was just better at that because they had more experience.
But law school economics being law school economics, he was fairly unusual.
Most people are hired at the entry level and most people are hired after two, three, four,
five years of practice experience because if you're going to jump to academia,
that's the time you do because you're particularly if you're in a firm,
you're approaching partnership or not.
But that's sort of the turning point for your career.
It's a little harder mid career to make that jump.
Right.
Yeah.
And I mean, one interesting thing I've learned and I've learned more from you about his
side practice elements.
He had more than I realized.
He had done a bunch of pension work in practice.
And continue to do something.
Some of that after his started being a professor at KU.
Did that did his the difference in age between Ray and most of the law school faculty
when you socialize together, did that impact anything?
Not that I can recall.
Although it did lead to a wonderful benefit for me.
So again, as you said, we were mostly younger faculty and Ray was much more senior and retired
much earlier than the contemporaries I joined with.
And as a retired emeritus professor,
Gats continued his eligibility for basketball tickets.
And the thing about basketball tickets back then is although Kansas some years was quite good,
it wasn't the kind of hyper system that we see today where unless you donate
fifteen, twenty thousand dollars, you can't get a decent seat now in field house
unless you just happen to have one and you hung on to it.
And so Ray and Mo got less and less interested in going to games.
So he would buy tickets and then he would give them to me.
So one, I mean, I pay him, but I would use his tickets because he had better seats
than I could have ever gotten.
The other thing was the ticket system at that time was a little bit corrupt in the following sense.
That another senior colleague at that time, Charlie Oldfather, was one of the faculty
representatives to the athletic board, which were the faculty advisors for the sports system.
And Charlie could put a word in with the ticket office.
So for many of the younger colleagues, they got seats that were really quite good because
Charlie just arranged for them.
So Mo and Ray's seats were center court, maybe six, seven rows up, eight, ten rows up
in the bleachers that are on the floor.
They were spectacular seats.
And because of the age gap and the fact that Ray was kind enough not to say to them,
oh, just resell my tickets to somebody else, I'm out.
He would keep them in, just sort of sublet them to me.
So for years, we had these spectacular seats.
And then the university started realizing they had to go to the more modern seats.
And they kicked all the faculty out, including Ray and Mo, and therefore Joyce and I.
And they put all the faculty up in the balcony somewhere.
And so that was sort of the end of that.
But that was an unintended benefit because of the age gap.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Do you remember the last time you saw Ray?
No, I don't.
I remember going to his funeral.
And I'm not sure how that was, but I just don't recall.
Did the...
When he retired, was there any retirement party for him when he fully retired?
Oh, I'm sure there was.
He was greatly appreciated as a colleague and a professor.
I can't imagine that we wouldn't have given him some sort of sendoff,
but it's been too many years for me to remember.
And I think that's a good point.
I think 35, not that anybody's counting.
He was ill for a number of years, I think, at least a couple, two or three years before he died in 2000.
Do you remember when you learned that you were going to be a professor?
In 2000, do you remember when you learned that he had died?
Was there a general announcement?
You were still on the faculty, so I wonder if there was a general announcement.
Oh, there must have been.
It's hard to remember when emails were started.
Now, there's, of course, this stuff's announced on email and on websites,
and it's easy to track down.
And I just don't recall how we would have announced that.
It would have been in the local paper, of course, but how we told our alumni.
And law schools are funny because every three years,
you get a new group of people who have no memory of the place.
So the students there wouldn't have known who Ray was.
It was just among the faculty that we would have had that memory.
And then I'm sure there were faculty hired after Ray retired that didn't know him.
So again, it's largely because it was such a young faculty,
we all sort of grew there together and we're all relatively about the same age.
So it was very cohesive in that sense.
And Ray was just older.
Right.
So yeah, it was people like Charlie Oldfather that really were as contemporaries.
Right.
Do you recall your feelings when you heard that he had died?
My feeling was that he, well, a sense of loss,
because for me, he really did sort of personify professionalism.
He was a little bit reserved.
He was a little bit formal.
He was older.
Maybe that was part of it.
But he was very much about craft.
He really cared about his teaching.
And I know he cared about his lawyering.
And he was an extremely careful lawyer and a thoughtful lawyer.
And that just made such an impression on me as a young faculty member.
And then I actually knew him.
I don't know how well others knew him, but because we taught the same course
in those early years, that was part of my maturing experience in the law school.
So it really did feel like a sense of loss in kind of a profound way.
Also, again, because we're relatively young faculty, we hadn't really lost anybody.
So this was, I think he was the first colleague that I knew to have died.
And that was kind of daunting to think about, I think, for faculty in their 30s.
Right.
Yeah.
Any other memories you can think of you'd like to share?
Not about him.
I remember Mo getting mowed down by a student on a bike on Jayhawk Boulevard.
And she had a broken arm for a long time, which was quite the story.
She didn't look right and left, which you have to do when you cross
in a college street and she got run over by a bike.
Yeah.
Okay. Let me stop the recording.