John Jackson as a Teacher

Abstract

It is with great sadness, but with enormous appreciation, that we pay tribute to John Jackson, who has meant so much to us, both professionally and personally. Among the many contributions to this special issue of JIEL, we want to focus on John’s role as a teacher to many generations of students. As we had occasion to recall in the introduction of the Festschrift we edited in his honor in 2000, 1 John literally introduced us to each other many years ago in Ann Arbor. We were enrolled in different programs, but John took the initiative to connect us early on as he had realized that we shared an interest in international trade law (for the record, it was safeguards and voluntary export restraints at that point). How many times afterwards have we not heard a similar story of people, his students to begin with, whom John brought together as he had intuited that this connection might spark something interesting? John truly was a networker, well ‘avant la lettre’. If one was lucky, and many people were, John’s remarkable wife Joan would pick up the scent and supplement additional encouragement and personal interest. John’s lectures no doubt were inspiring. The main impression he left with us was that the topics he dealt with were complex, and we had better dig in deep to meet his expectations. All of us wanted to do well, as you certainly did not want to disappoint him. His assignments were demanding–both in terms of substance as well as format. One example still sticks in our mind: he asked his students to write papers during his trade course. With hindsight, this was very generous of him, as it meant that he took the time in his very busy schedule to test and improve our writing and analytical skills by reviewing quite a few papers during an academic term. He did impose page limits on these papers: if we remember well, it was three single-spaced pages. One of our colleagues, who was as eager to perform well as we all were, thought that he had found a way to impress on John the breadth of his research: he did manage to squeeze his main argument into three pages, but added more than 20 pages of footnotes! This event gave birth to a page and footnote limitation on any subsequent papers written during John’s trade course.