I knew one of Tigar's classmates when he was in law school. He would tell me about this amazing student who knew much more than the profs. He was certain that Tigar would make a mark on the world. -- Michael Perelman
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He was already a legend before he got to Berkeley. Tigar was either student body president or some thing like that in first my high school the year or so before I got there. My best friend's older brother Ken C. ran for student office attempting to carry on a just dawning tradition of vaguely defined progressivism in a younger generation in the late fifties. Among other issues (like civil rights, and HUAC), the Carol Chessman execution took place about this time and had been a focal point of high school discussions and UCB campus activism against the death penalty.
Any way my friend's older brother went to UCB and linked up with Tigar and others in Slate, a progressive student political party on campus in (`59-63?) to push left or progressive student politics at Cal. After rankling for two or three years over every minor dip-shit rule put in place specifically to stop student activism, the Slate crew and others on campus got fed up and planned a direct assault, the famous Sept `64 fall campaign against the administration's policies on free speech---that ended up with the Sproul Hall sit-in, known as FSM.
Ken followed Tigar into Boalt as Tigar was graduating. I can't remember now if Tigar had tried to apply to Douglas for a clerkship or that was just part of a dinner table discussion with Ken and Bill and their folks. Perhaps Douglas didn't have a position open at the time. But at any rate Tigar ended up applying to Brennan, was accepted, and then was rejected by Warren or some committee of other justices.
In a way I hate thinking about and remembering those times, because they are so far away, and increasingly unbelievable, unimaginable. Nobody wants to hear it. The entire sweep of those events and people have been erased from the public mind, if not the public record, and there is some strange form of mass denial intimately linked with the whole era--to the effect that all that happened on another planet to another people.
The established political institutions and their technocrats have systematically defended their own mediocrity against that whole progressive generation. Hence they (we?) have had no impact on the basic foundations of the society and the traditional conceptualization of public thought, conduct, and action.
People like Tigar and others should be sitting on the Supreme Court, or working their way through senior positions in the federal and state systems, or part of the elected political establishment. Instead we have an ocean of utterly despicable mediocrities---obvious ideological beneficiaries of the much touted merit system of an open, free, and competitive society, blah, blah, blah..
Chuck Grimes