Legendary CU professor publishes book on Torah and Constitution

By Paul Cody

This past summer, Cornell Professor Emeritus Milton Konvitz was honored with a professorship in his name through contributions from 192 of his devoted former students, as well as other alumni and friends. The Milton R. Konvitz Professorship of Jewish and Near Eastern Studies is one of four new professorships in Cornell's Jewish Studies program, which Konvitz is credited with helping create nearly 50 years ago.

And a few months earlier, at an age when most people are content to rest on their laurels, Konvitz, 90, published a new book, Torah and Constitution (Syracuse University Press, 1998), a series of essays that examines the connections between the Torah and the U.S. Constitution. Konvitz elaborates on the centrality of law both in America and in Judaism, the former bound to the Constitution and its interpretation by the Supreme Court, the latter bound to the Hebrew Bible that has been expanded into a comprehensive legal order by rabbinic interpretation.

Konvitz is a pre-eminent scholar on the Bill of Rights and civil rights. His book The Constitution and Civil Rights was a pioneering study when it was published in 1946 by Columbia University Press. In the early 1940s, Konvitz was assistant general counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund under Thurgood Marshall, later justice of the Supreme Court.

Konvitz earned a J.D. from the New York University Law School in 1930 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell. He taught law and public administration at New York University for eight years before joining the founding faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 1946. A few years later he also joined the Law School faculty as a professor. He taught at Cornell until 1975, when he became professor emeritus.

While at Cornell, Konvitz taught a legendary course, American Ideals, to some 8,000 students from almost all schools on campus. The course spanned two semesters, beginning with the philosophical and religious underpinnings of the Constitution and coming to focus on the Bill of Rights as interpreted by the Supreme Court. In the course, which his many students still recall with reverence, Konvitz employed texts such as the Bible, Plato's Dialogues, the plays of Sophocles, John Locke's Treatises on Civil Government, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and other classics. And he never gave the same lecture twice.

"I've had students who completed my course, received their credits, and then they came to hear me again as an auditor, not for credits," Konvitz told Cornell News Service in 1989. "This confirmed my judgment that it is important to be ever fresh and new and creative every year."

During his years at Cornell, Konvitz served on the board of Cornell United Religious Work and on the national governing board of the Hillel Foundation. He was responsible for founding Young Israel House on campus, where Orthodox Jewish students could reside and have kosher meals, as well as conduct daily religious services and study religious texts.

And for nearly 30 years, Konvitz was director of the Cornell Liberian Codification Project, which was funded by the Liberian government and initially also by the U.S. government and which prepared the Liberian code of laws and edited the opinions of the Liberian Supreme Court. He ended the project when military rule supplanted the civil government following a revolution.

Besides the 10 books he has written, Konvitz has edited 13 books. He was co-founder of the periodicals Midstream, Judaism and the Journal of Law and Religion, and he served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Judaica.

"Professor Konvitz is the quintessential scholar-teacher," said President Hunter Rawlings in his Cornell Reunion address in June. "And if he represented the best of Cornell, he also embodies many of the qualities we seek to strengthen in the university today."

Janet Charles Emeritus Professor Milton Konvitz stands in the library of the Cornell Club in New York in May.

In a biography of Konvitz that was sponsored by the ILR School, former Cornell Professor David J. Danelski wrote, "He had students, not disciples. He sent them on their own quest for truth and justice guided by their own candles, and he broadened and deepened their lives by helping them discover their own powers."

While they lived in Ithaca, he and his wife, Mary, opened their home as a gathering place for students who often came there to visit, to celebrate the holidays and to introduce the Konvitzes to their parents.

"Even after the students became alumni, they kept in touch with the Konvitzes through visits and a lively correspondence that has often spanned decades," President Rawlings told an audience gathered in May in New York to celebrate the establishment of the Konvitz Professorship.

And this latest honor is one in a long list for the eminent scholar. He has been awarded honorary degrees by seven universities, including Rutgers and Syracuse universities, and has received distinguished awards from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yeshiva University and New York University. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fund for the Republic, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Konvitz and his wife now reside in Oakhurst, N.J.