King Hall Mourns Professor Emeritus Gary Goodpaster

Gary GoodpasterGary Goodpaster, Professor Emeritus of Law at UC Davis, has died.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1937, he enrolled in Indiana University and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key. He then received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study philosophy at Columbia University in New York. At the end of the fellowship, he enrolled in the Indiana University School of Law. After earning his law degree, he took a position as the law clerk to Chief Judge John Hastings of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, and then joined the law faculty of the University of Iowa.

Professor Goodpaster arrived at King Hall in 1971. During his tenure at Davis, he worked for three summers as a Criminal Trial Attorney for Federal Defenders of San Diego, Inc. He also served as Chief Assistant State Public Defender, setting up and managing the new state Public Defender's Office. He wrote two books, one on constitutional law and one on negotiation and dispute resolution.  His many academic articles included "The Human Arts of Lawyering: Interviewing and Counseling," one of the first in the then-nascent field of academic writing on the teaching of lawyering skills, and "The Trial for Life: Effective Assistance of Counsel in Death Penalty Cases," a major article aimed at establishing the basic law on this issue.

In 1992, he became involved in international development consulting, focusing on a broad array of legal and economic concerns, and as part of this work, he taught the first negotiation skills course to faculty at the University of Indonesia Law School, a course that became the seed of negotiation skills training courses in many Indonesian law schools. On two leaves of absence from UC Davis, he was Chief of Party for two major law and economics projects in Indonesia. Upon retirement from UC Davis on January 1, 2000, Goodpaster continued his international development work, working on short-term projects in Afghanistan, East Timor, Egypt, Mongolia, the Philippines and Zambia. In 2005, he taught for a semester at the Johns Hopkins University International School in Nanjing, China.

Professor Goodpaster died at home in the autumn of 2012, surrounded by his family. He is survived by wife Gracie; sons Jude, Blaise, and Adam; daughter Jessica; daughters-in-law MaiAnh, Stacie, and Gina; grandchildren Joaquin, Maisha, Kai, Cody, and Mari; sister Yolanda, niece Nicole, and nephew Victor.

Davis Enterprise: Gary Goodpaster obituary

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