C10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
ObituariesBY EMILY LANGERYale Kamisar, a law professor
whose incisive commentaries
helped provide the intellectual
underpinning of landmark U.S.
Supreme Court rulings guaran-
teeing protections for criminal
defendants and suspects, died
Jan. 30 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He
was 92 and had been dubbed the
“father of Miranda,” a reference to
the recitation of rights known to
even the most casual viewer of TV
police procedurals:
You have the right to remain
silent. Anything you say can and
will be used against you in a court
of law. You have the right to have
a lawyer. If you cannot afford a
lawyer, one will be appointed for
you, if you wish.
Mr. Kamisar’s son Gordon
Kamisar confirmed his death but
did not cite a cause.
Mr. Kamisar, an emeritus pro-
fessor at the University of Michi-
gan Law School, spent half a
century immersed in some of the
most pressing debates surround-
ing criminal law and the constitu-
tional rights afforded to those
accused of violating it. His writ-
ings were cited in more than 30
Supreme Court opinions and in
legions more decisions of federal
and state courts.
“At 37, Kamisar has already
produced a torrent of speech and
endless writings that easily make
him the most overpowering crim-
inal-law scholar in the U.S.,” a
writer for Time magazine ob-
served in 1966. That year, Mr.
Kamisar was cited four times in
the Supreme Court decision in
Miranda v. Arizona.
The Miranda decision was
written by Earl Warren, the chief
justice who presided over the
high court during an era of expan-
sion of civil rights and civil liber-
ties. He appeared to have taken
heavily into consideration the
thesis that Mr. Kamisar laid out in
his 1965 essay “Equal Justice in
the Gatehouses and Mansions of
American Criminal Procedure.”
In that essay, Mr. Kamisar con-
trasted the care with which de-
fendants were handled in the
courtroom with the relative law-
lessness that sometimes reigned
in the police interrogation room.
“The courtroom is a splendid
place where defense attorneys
bellow and strut and prosecuting
attorneys are hemmed in at many
turns,” he wrote in a passage
demonstrating his signature lit-
erary flair. “But what happens
before an accused reaches the
safety and enjoys the comfort of
this veritable mansion? Ah,
there’s the rub. Typically he must
first pass through a much less
pretentious edifice, a police sta-
tion with bare back rooms and
locked doors.”
In essence, the Supreme Court
ruled in the Miranda case that
the Fifth Amendment right
against self-incrimination was
valid not only in court, but also in
police custody. So great is the
cultural penetration of the case
that suspects duly advised of their
rights are said to have been
“Mirandized.”
The Supreme Court earlier cit-
ed Mr. Kamisar’s writings in Gide-
on v. Wainwright (1963), the case
in which the court ruled that, in
accordance with the Sixth
Amendment, states must provide
lawyers for criminal defendantswho cannot not afford to hire
them on their own. In a unani-
mous decision, the court declared
it “an obvious truth” that “any
person ... who is too poor to hire a
lawyer, cannot be assured a fair
trial unless counsel is provided
for him.”
Mr. Kamisar wrote extensively
on Fourth Amendment protec-
tions against unreasonable
search and seizure and champi-
oned the “exclusionary rule,” ac-
cording to which prosecutors
may not use in court any evidence
gathered in violation of those
protections.
When Mr. Kamisar retired
from the University of Michigan
in 2004, Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a
tribute published in the Michigan
Law Review that though his com-
mentary was “more than occa-
sionally devastating,” it “never
extends beyond the realm of thefair.”
Yale Kamisar — he did not have
a middle name at birth but later
in life sometimes used the middle
name Jerome — was born in New
York City on Aug. 29, 1929. His
father, a bakery salesman, and his
mother, a homemaker, fled anti-
semitism in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Kamisar grew up in the
Bronx, where he acquired an ac-
cent that years later would in-
spire the Time journalist, in a
description of his professorial
persona, to write that “like a
Bronx Socrates, he harangues en-
tranced students in thunderous
tones.”
Reflecting on his upbringing,
he recalled that he began to un-
derstand the realities of both in-
justice and indigence when his
bicycle was stolen and his parents
told him they could not afford to
replace it.
Mr. Kamisar received a schol-arship to attend New York Uni-
versity, where he received a bach-
elor’s degree in English in 1950
before enrolling at Columbia Law
School. He graduated with the
class of 1954 after serving with
the Army in the Korean War,
where he served as a platoon
commander. His decorations in-
cluded a Purple Heart.
After law school, Mr. Kamisar
joined the Washington firm of
Covington & Burling, planning to
specialize in antitrust law. He
changed career paths after taking
on the case, pro bono, of a drug
convict whose handwritten peti-
tion prosecutors sought to use
against him.
Mr. Kamisar taught at the Uni-
versity of Minnesota Law School
from 1957 to 1964 before joining
the University of Michigan the
next year.
In addition to his work on
criminal procedure, he wrote ex-tensively on physician-assisted
suicide, which he opposed, in
what some observers of his work
took as a departure from his usual
defense of civil liberties. Mr.
Kamisar saw the matter different-
ly and regarded laws allowing
euthanasia as a slippery slope.
“I identify with the dying pa-
tient, who is weak, vulnerable,
subject to suggestion, coercion,
seduction,” he told the New York
Times in 1996. “If assisted suicide
went through, we’d be providing
more safeguards for criminals
picked up on the street than we
would for the terminally ill.”
The books he wrote or co-wrote
included “Criminal Justice in Our
Time” (1965), “Police Interroga-
tion and Confessions: Essays in
Law and Policy” (1980) and nu-
merous editions of the casebooks
“Modern Criminal Procedure”
and “Constitutional Law.”
“It is a remarkable figure, but it
is a true one: Over a half a million
law students have used either the
Kamisar book on criminal pro-
cedure or constitutional law,” a
speaker noted, introducing him
at a 2011 lecture at the University
of Washington law school.
Mr. Kamisar’s first marriage, to
Esther Englander, ended in di-
vorce. His second wife, the former
Christine Keller, died in 1997 after
more than two decades of mar-
riage.
In 1999, Mr. Kamisar married
Joan Russell. Besides his wife, of
Ann Arbor, survivors include
three sons from his first mar-
riage, David Kamisar of West
Bloomfield, Mich., Gordon
Kamisar of Sammamish, Wash.,
and Jonathan Kamisar of Weston,
Conn.; a sister; and four grand-
children.
In her tribute to Mr. Kamisar,
Ginsburg recalled the admoni-
tion of the jurist Learned Hand
about academic detachment that
one “may not carry a sword be-
neath a scholar’s gown or lead
flaming causes from a cloister.”
Mr. Kamisar “acknowledged
his own tendency to ‘carry a
sword beneath [his] gown,’” Gins-
burg wrote, “implying his failure
to follow Judge Hand’s advice.”
But “in my conversations and
correspondence with Yale, how-
ever, I have seen not only the
mark of a great warrior,” she
continued. “I have seen as well a
fine thinker at work, one ready to
reconsider even long-held beliefs
in hopes of finding a better an-
swer.”YALE KAMISAR, 92
Legal scholar’s essay helped underpin now-ubiquitous Miranda warning
BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY/UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
A 1965 essay by Yale Kamisar compared the care that defendants received in court with the relative lawlessness suspects sometimes
experienced in police interrogation rooms. That essay appears to have figured into the Supreme Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona.FUNERAL SERVICES
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