David Herwitz

David Richard Herwitz—prominent Harvard Law School professor, draftsman of the corporation law still used by the State of Israel, champion bridge player and devoted golf duffer even at age 95–died, Monday April 8, 2024. He was 98.

Mr. Herwitz, who taught at the law school for more than a half-century, was at once the prototypical Harvard professor and the exception to the stereotype. Steely smart, scholarly accomplished, brilliant in the classroom and empathetic in student conferences, Mr. Herwitz, whose portrait hangs in the halls of the law school, presented the opposite profile of the autocratic Charles Kingfield of the 1973 film The Paper Chase.

“David was at once one of the most beloved —and respected—professors at Harvard Law,” said Irwin Cotler, former justice minister and attorney general of Canada and a onetime visiting professor at the law school. Mark Wolf, senior judge in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, added: “I recall David being a kind gentleman who was not, like some of his colleagues, intimidating.”

The antidote to the image of the tyrannical, demanding Professor Kingfield, Professor Herwitz also was the master of the anecdote, marrying approachable stories to otherwise intimidating legal theories and practices. His academic specialty was business planning and taxation but his personal style was anything but all-business, his relationships with students and colleagues anything but taxing. The skills of judgment and problem-solving that he taught in class were the very attributes that he applied in person.

“He knew not only how to integrate the technical details of tax law, accounting, and corporate and securities laws but also how to be guided by integrity and wisdom,” said Martha Minow, a onetime dean of the law school who continues to teach there. “He also was personally kind and devoted to mentoring each new generation.”

The longest-tenured professor at the law school, he taught large classes, almost always oversubscribed, and his students included, among scores of legal luminaries, Barack Obama and both Martin Ginsburg and Ruth Bader Ginsburg; the late Supreme Court jurist always greeted him as “my favorite professor.” Though his colleagues—famous lawyers Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagen, and former Harvard president Derek Bok, all close friends—were better known, none was more beloved than Mr. Herwitz.

Mr. Herwitz was particularly devoted to a program bringing public officials from developing countries to study at Harvard and then to return to help shape their nations' tax, fiscal, and administrative programs.

With what a former student, Robert Saltzman, later associate dean of the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California, called “a very dry sense of humor that livened up class,” Mr. Herwitz won and cultivated a set of friendships and admirers that went far beyond the walls of the law school.

One of them was Richard Remis, who was a child when he first met Mr. Herwitz and whom Mr. Herwitz tried, in one of his few defeats on the Cambridge campus, to persuade to go to law school. “He was a wonderful, warm listener, who always supported and encouraged whatever path I chose to take,” said Mr. Remis, who became a top figure at the Bank of America in Boston, “even when that meant a business career, not the law.” Another was David Shribman, the former Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe and executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who often said Mr. Herwitz became his surrogate father after the death, in 2004, of his real father. “David Herwitz was the only male I ever knew who deserved the word ‘sweet,’ ” said Mr. Shribman, who considered himself a lifelong Herwitz protege, in part because Mr. Herwitz once dreamed of becoming a sportswriter.

These two, who grew up in Mr. Herwitz’s orbit in Swampscott, were not alone. Ted Tiflis followed Mr. Herwitz’s passions and taught accounting and corporate and securities law at the University of Colorado Law School. Mr. Herwitz had encountered his student toiling in the library and invited him to join him in tutoring the foreign tax officials he was teaching in the International Program in Taxation.

“The influence of a great teacher like Dave Herwitz brings him nearer to immortality than most of us get,” Mr. Tiflis wrote in a 2006 article in the Harvard Law Bulletin. He credited Mr. Herwitz for having “opened my mind wide to the vast excitement and significance of this seemingly prosaic language of business.”

The son of Harry Herwitz, who operated a candy factory in Lynn, and the former Sara Shapiro, who was president of the Sisterhood at the old Temple Beth-El, Mr. Herwitz was born December 8, 1925, in Lynn and was a graduate of Swampscott High School. He began his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin before going to MIT, where he was a top-ranked graduate of the Class of 1946. He then graduated, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law in 1949. He went into private practice with the Mintz, Levin firm in Boston after a brief stint on the U.S. Tax Court.

It was during that time that he became a lecturer at the Northeastern University School of Law and a training fellow at Harvard Law, eventually becoming an assistant professor at Harvard in 1954 and, in time, assuming two endowed chairs, as the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor and then the Royall Professor. He also served as the faculty supervisor of the Harvard-Brandeis cooperative research program for Israel’s legal development. For three years beginning in 1961, Mr. Herwitz was a consultant for the Treasury Department.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Herwitz’s mother bought a ticket to a Radcliffe house-and-garden tour. There she encountered Carla Barron, a brilliant rising Radcliffe College junior who had been stationed in the living room at one of the homes, presumably to assure that none of the guests made off with any of the house furnishings—and who struck Mr. Herwitz’s mother as an attractive belle for her son. Mr. Herwitz then telephoned Miss Barron, who in turn asked her potential suitor how he had come to contact her. He said that his mother told him to. “I decided I wanted to meet a person who would tell a lie like that,” Carla Herwitz recalled at age 91, “so I went out with him.”

The two were married on January 20, 1960.

Mr. Herwitz was active in Temple Emanu-El in Marblehead, eventually serving as its congregation president. He also served on the board of the Jewish Federation.

Mr. Herwitz’s daughter, Julie Butkiewicz, preceded him in death. Besides his wife, Mr. Herwitz is survived by a son, Andrew; a daughter-in law, Johanna; and three grandchildren, Edith, Laszlo, and Jude.

Funeral arrangements are private.