I first met Stanley Katz in 1976. John Demos, who was then my teacher at Brandeis University, introduced us. Stan was already an important public figure in my new world, the world of American legal history. I knew he was the editor of the book series of the American Society for Legal History, Studies in Legal History. Morton Horwitz’s Transformation of American Law was about to be published in that series and that made American legal history, all of a sudden, a field to be noticed.Footnote ¹ He was everywhere. Stan Katz knew everyone, and more importantly, everyone knew him. In no time, he was the president of the ASLH. Within another decade, he would be the president of the Organization of American Historians. He was the general editor for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise volumes for the history of the United States Supreme Court.Footnote ² By the early 1980s, to steal a line from Rayman Solomon, he was like the Don, as played by Marlon Brando, in the first Godfather movie. Many of us would wait in line for an audience, to ask for help with one or another professional need.Footnote ³ In my own case, that came when I learned that the dean of the law school at which I was teaching expected to deny my tenure. Stan made a few phone calls, at least so I imagined. And suddenly openings at other law schools appeared.

But my goal here is not to review his CV or to talk more about those professional accomplishments in the world of academia, many as they were. Or to wonder about his precocity in ascending to those positions, at what was such a young age (though he then seemed old and wise to me). Or to tell anecdotes about his support for many of us.

It is rather to reflect on the significance of an energetic public life, not the life many of us choose when we enter into historical study, but the life that Stan Katz modeled and continues to model. His career is one of public service, that is, of public service as a historian and on behalf of the humanities. And the public service work informed the historical scholarship and teaching he continued to produce and to offer, particularly with regard to the history of nonprofit corporations. Or the arts policy workshop he established at Princeton. Or his courses for Princeton’s American Studies Program and in what was then known as the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on “civil society.” Or his innumerable book reviews for the service that screens books for purchase by American public libraries.Footnote ⁴ And as Felicia Kornbluh brings out in her interview with him, he early on played an important role in the work of the Chicago branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, both in the decriminalization of abortion and in the Skokie Controversy. It is not just that everyone wanted and wants him on their board. It is that he makes those boards better and that he makes humanistic knowledge “public” and available to wider communities.

In the 1980s, when he left Princeton University to become the president of the American Council of Learned Societies, Katz became the most prominent voice for the humanities in America. And as a result, he became embroiled in controversies. In our time of culture wars, that earlier iteration of the culture wars may not be much remembered. Thanks to Lynne Cheney, then the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a U.S. Senator, and others, Stan Katz, the new president of the ACLS, the umbrella organization for humanities scholars in this country, was cast as an enemy. Of what, according to the 1980s neo-conservatives regnant in Reagan’s America? Of the traditional humanities, sometimes. Of the decline of standards and of relativism. Of the growing internationalization and diversification of knowledge. Of critical perspectives on the American past. Stan Katz’s ACLS became for them the leading proponent of relativism and then of deconstruction.

Katz, one should add, is and was an odd embodiment of this imagined counterculture or of postmodernism. And one should remember that he was hated as much because he insisted on traditional standards of excellence, because he refused to bend to narrow political goals, as because he stood in for or represented the forms of humanistic scholarship that neo-conservatives targeted as the enemy. To know Katz makes it hard to imagine him as the avatar of deconstruction and of the counterculture and of militant feminism. But no matter. At that moment, he was it, at least for the long moment that was the later 1980s and early 1990s.

The longer narrative of the battles he fought are matters for another day and for another historian. In our present moment of culture wars, it is, however, worth remembering that culture wars are not a twenty-first century novelty, although the 1980s version may be forgotten today. The enemies then may not be the enemies today.

It is conventional, and not wrong, to decry the state of the humanities, in the face of declining enrollments and the expansion of the sciences and of other supposedly more practical forms of knowledge production. To be a humanistic scholar today is to feel vulnerable and threatened. Thinking back about Katz’s days at the ACLS should remind us though how much worse things might have become. But for Katz and his colleagues there and then at the ACLS. The consequences of his and their work are present in our daily lives as humanistic academics. In the internationalization of the American humanities, including the field of legal history. In the opening up of fields to new and more diverse communities of scholars. In the protection and the opening up of archives in several places around the world (even in Cuba). In the beginning steps in the digitization of knowledge that makes so much formerly arcane and inaccessible knowledge available to wider communities. In the vigorous and interdisciplinary conversations that shape our work. In the breakdown of the stultifying siloes that constrained traditional forms of knowledge.

For many of us, and even more, in the popular imagination, becoming a historian suggests a withdrawal from the world, a cloistering. It is that for some of us, at least some of the time. But never so for Stan Katz. Becoming and being a historian is and was for him a way to speak on behalf of communities, to enter into the world, to represent others. And also, it should be added, an opportunity to fight battles on behalf of wider publics and communities.

A strenuous life, and one filled with disappointments as well as achievements. But also a public life, one that models one way to be a legal historian.