Charles B. Blackmar
Professor, Judge, Chief Justice … and Charlie

The following is a eulogy delivered by Michael A. Wolff, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, at the funeral service for Judge Blackmar.

April 19, 1922– January 20, 2007

School of Law Professor Emeritus Charles Blakey Blackmar, former Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and distinguished legal scholar, died in Clearwater, Florida, on January 20, 2007.

Everyone, I am sure, remembers the first time they met Charlie Blackmar. I certainly do. It was in 1975 when I came to Saint Louis University to teach law. Our offices were next door to each other. We exchanged pleasantries, talked about judges whom we had known and knew in common. He had clever nicknames for his. Political correctness aside, I don’t remember which judge was “the little magician” or which one was “the wicked dwarf,” but I realized that in this great brain of his was a rather wicked sense of humor. It also occurred to me that this man probably had forgotten more law than I would ever know. But as I came to know him, I realized that he probably did not forget anything … at least about the law… or baseball.

About the third day of my time at Saint Louis University I was in the library and I heard his voice saying, “Have you read this case at 23 Federal 2nd 671?” (or some such thing like that). “I’ve got to read this other case,” and he gives a citation. Then I realized he was not talking to me; he was talking to himself. And it was a better conversation, to be sure. As many of you know, he had a way of processing information by speaking it to himself out loud. One of those characteristics that you just catch on to eventually.
Professor Blackmar was an extraordinary teacher, one of the most popular at the law school. It was truly a great fortune for Saint Louis University in 1966 to obtain the services of this extraordinary scholar, great and deeply experienced lawyer and superb teacher. His main course was Corporations, and it was routinely over-enrolled. But more importantly, he was the “go to” person for everything. If the dean needed a course taught at the last minute, Charlie was it. I remember when Dick Childress, our former dean, died in 1977 early in the semester when he was teaching Constitutional Law. Charlie was in the classroom for the next class picking up exactly where Childress had left off. He was truly the law school’s utility infielder.

What the students loved about his teaching was his wonderful sense of humor. He kept them awake, and kept them engaged in the subject matter. The source of his popularity was not just his humor; he had a very logical mind and his analyses were well structured. He made the subject look easy, even when it was not.

His teaching was, as well, accompanied by some unique mannerisms. There were a number of students who made a specialty of Professor Blackmar imitations. Probably the high point (or low point) was in the early 1980s when, at a student variety show, two of the better imitators did a skit to the tune of “Dueling Banjos,” called “Dueling Blackmars,” where they imitated his mannerisms in tempo to the “Dueling Banjos” music.

He was no stranger to politics, academic as well as in the real world. Perhaps most of you think of the academic world as populated mostly by Democrats; Charlie was a Republican. Rather famously, in 1972, he was the head of “Republicans for McGovern.” And, to be fair, probably its only member. He was a friend, mentor and occasional critic to some of our state’s most notable Republicans.

He played academic politics and real politics with good humor. When students agitated to be allowed to attend faculty meetings, Professor Blackmar took the position that attending faculty meetings would violate the constitution’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

He was the fastest reader and the fastest writer I have ever known. His output, as shown in the many works listed in his biography, was prodigious. This extraordinary productivity could produce, as is common in academia, a bit of envy. One of his faculty colleagues, who wanted to make sure that Charlie was not the smartest guy around, came up to him one day and pestered him about whether he had read such and such a law review article. Charlie responded: “Well no. Actually I’ve been too busy writing law review articles to read that many of them.” To the contrary, for many recent years, unbeknownst to the School of Law faculty, Charlie read every faculty writing as the sole judge of an award given by a St. Louis law firm for the best faculty writing of the year. This position seems fitting in view of the fact that when the award was instituted, many years ago, Professor Blackmar was the first winner.

Charlie’s sartorial reputation may or may not have been deserved. I personally never saw him wear one brown shoe and one black shoe, but I tell you, if he did, they were a matched set because he had another pair just like them at home.

From the late 60s until he went to the Supreme Court of Missouri in 1982, Charlie was the main author of Federal Jury Practice and Instructions, a work that he turned over to me, in part, after he left for the court. It was an enormous undertaking. But during the same time period when he was writing and teaching, he also did scores of labor arbitrations and supervised the writing of briefs in criminal cases for his good friend, Attorney General Jack Danforth. Later in the 70s he undertook a project to rewrite the entire election code of Missouri. It was not a simple matter, and there are probably very few minds large enough to get around the subject. It is probable that every change in election law since then has not been an improvement. In the early 80s he was the first settlement coordinator for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
He was modest about his accomplishments as a lawyer and legal scholar. I remember him telling me, shortly after we met, that he was a member of the “Rope and Chair Club” and the “Million Dollar Club.” The first club is composed of lawyers whose clients have received the death penalty; the second club has lawyers whose clients have suffered a million dollar judgment. That was back when a million dollars was a lot of money.

Throughout his career, he was steadfastly for the underdog, and championed a number of causes that he felt were just and right. He did not care, particularly, whose ox he gored, and was willing to write poison-pen letters to as many powerful people as he thought ought to listen to him. He was a natural adversary of pompous blow-hards.
Charlie was a passionate defender of the Missouri nonpartisan court plan. One of his last published works, forthcoming, is a history of the nonpartisan court plan which is in part a history of his own involvement with it, starting with circulating petitions in 1940 for the measure to be put on the ballot. Charlie’s father, a prominent Kansas City lawyer, was one of the initiators of the nonpartisan court plan. This group of farsighted lawyers, that included his father, took on the political establishment of the day and ran the first successful campaign in the country to have a nonpartisan court plan adopted. It has since become known as The Missouri Plan, and copied in some part in over 30 states.

As a judge, he was absolutely conscientious about the law, and always hoped to direct it in ways that made good common sense. He wrote decisions that were instrumental in changing the way we try cases to juries, for example. As Judge Blackmar he was scrupulous in separating the needs of the law from his own personal