David Haddock is Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University and a Senior Fellow Emeritus at PERC.
The day Fred McChesney departed this life, the world lost an intelligent, enthusiastic, and intellectually rigorous scholar of law & economics. A great many of us also lost one of our most trusted and generous friends.
I first met Fred when Emory University, hoping to recruit the then young scholar to the law school faculty, brought him to Atlanta to deliver a research paper. The effort was successful, and Fred joined as an assistant professor in the fall of 1983. Jon Macey joined the law school, also as an entry-level assistant professor, at about the same time. A couple of years earlier Professor Bill Carney and law school Dean Tom Morgan had enticed Henry Manne to Emory to establish a new Law & Economics Center. Although Henry did not know me, upon Armen Alchian’s recommendation he persuaded me to leave Ohio State to join the LEC soon after it commenced operation.
I was only a bit older than Fred and Jon. Each of us had training in economics in addition to our interest in law. We shared a respect for markets. We had noticed how often special interests deflected government interventions away from the public interest that was the ostensible motivation. One might say we three had large Venn diagram intersections of background, interest, and outlook. Fred, Jon and I quickly became friends both at work and – along with our respective girlfriends and eventual wives – at leisure. We began to coauthor journal articles and book chapters, sometimes in pairs and sometimes as a trio.
Alas, though Chris Curran and Matt Lindsay from the economics department shared the law school’s enthusiasm for the LEC, the university administration proved decidedly lukewarm toward Manne’s ambitious blueprint. After flashing onto the national, or rather international, stage for a few bright years, the LEC began to atrophy in the face of limitations issuing from above.
Fred, Henry, Jon and I each spent time at the International Center for Economic Research in Torino, Italy, becoming friends with ICER’s director Enrico Colombatto. Macey moved to Cornell. I spent a year at Yale before returning to join Emory’s economics department. Manne left to become dean of a humble law school in the DC suburbs that had been devoted almost exclusively to teaching. Henry quickly transformed that school into a nationally recognized research and innovative teaching institution now known as the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University, but his departure effectively ended the brief if illustrious history of the Emory LEC.
Fred and I visited the University of Chicago in 1987, and though I then moved directly to Northwestern where I finished my career, Fred returned to Emory for another ten years. The two of us continued to coauthor, sometimes with a third such as Bill Shughart, Terry Anderson, or Menahem Spiegel. I worked diligently to get Fred to Northwestern but Cornell succeeded first, though by then Macey had moved on to Yale. Two years later, Fred finally joined me at Northwestern where both he and Elaine held faculty positions until Elaine’s untimely death.
I have mentioned a number of people. Nearly all of those people have changed location, sometimes repeatedly. Through it all and across the deaths of Elaine, then Henry, and now Fred, we have all remained friends and often continued to work together, though usually at a distance.
Everyone who knew him remembers how easily Fred made friends upon meeting new people. Due to his extensive knowledge of rock music, Fred even became a telephone buddy of the late Casey Kasem, longtime host of the nationally syndicated America’s Top 40. Fred’s cordiality was not only social but extended into the work environment. He was no pushover, demanding careful thought in classroom and seminar, but he made his points calmly without endeavoring to cow or humiliate those with whom he disagreed, a trait that unfortunately is far from universal in the academic world.
Considering Fred’s passion for rock music, perhaps it is appropriate to end this remembrance with a few lightly edited lines from James Taylor’s Fire and Rain:
Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone.
The path laid down has put an end to you.
I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song,
I just can’t remember who to send it to.Won’t you look down upon us, Jesus,
You’ve got to help us make a stand.
You’ve just got to see us through another day.
My body’s aching and my time is at hand and I won’t make it any other way.Oh, I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.
I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend,
but I always thought that I’d see you again.
Rest in peace, pal.
