CommentaryIn 1996, when Professor Bernard Hibbitts first established JURIST, few could have foreseen the impact the project would have. Whether measured in terms of the individual lives it has touched, its global reach, or the impressions it has left on the landscape of online legal news coverage, JURIST’s role cannot be overstated.
What began as a modest online repository for legal scholarship evolved under Professor Hibbitts’ visionary leadership into a groundbreaking service that revolutionized how legal news reaches the public. Through his innovative approach of empowering law students as reporters and editors, he created a unique educational model that has trained generations of legal professionals while delivering accessible, authoritative coverage of rule-of-law issues to millions of readers worldwide. Upon his retirement in December 2024, after nearly three decades of service, his legacy endures in JURIST’s continued commitment to bridging the gap between legal academia and public understanding, fostering transparency and justice across borders.
A festschrift is a collection of writings published in honor of a scholar, traditionally during their lifetime. This digital festschrift for Professor Hibbitts will grow organically through regular contributions published several times weekly through February. All entries will be permanently archived and indexed on a dedicated section of JURIST’s website, creating a living testament to his transformative vision and lasting impact on legal journalism and education. This is the second entry in this ongoing series. You can read the first, authored by David M. Crane, Founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, here.
I first met Professor Hibbitts the way that thousands of other law students did, as a ray of sparkling light during 1L Orientation. Amidst instructions on how to use a combination lock, verify one’s email address, find the registrar’s window, and other first day minutiae, a lively, energetic man took the podium to pitch the assembled on the merits of learning and sharing a love of the law on the Internet. It wasn’t just the lingering vestiges of a Maritimes accent or the striking resemblance to a young Alan Ruck that made Professor Hibbitts stand out from the crowd. It was his evident zest and passion for this esoteric project, JURIST, through which a literal generation of students has researched, written, edited, led, organized, and grown in pursuit of a more fully-realized understanding of the law.
Law school can be, by its nature, a rather arcane and navel-gazing pursuit. As we learn it, “the Law” is the subtle difference between expectation and reasonable expectation, or the flowchart nightmare of the Battle of the Forms, or the surprising discovery of adverse possession, concepts accreted over time, inherited from various black robes and burlap tunics in the hazy past. What’s more, our primary concern with these concepts is not their inherent value or philosophical merit, but simply as a series of patterns that must be internalized so that they can be repeated so that we may someday settle the debt we’ve amassed in learning them. Left unchecked, this process can invite anxiety, vanity, maybe a bit of terror. For me, and hundreds of other students like me, JURIST provided that check.
Because, of course, the law is not a monolith, not confined to casebooks and dusty reporters, not stuck in time or place, not waiting for professors to deem it worthy of discussion. The law is alive, thriving and thrashing, blaring and whispering, helping and hurting, joining and dividing, all day, every day, everywhere. What better gift to give a terrified student than a deeper connection with their subject matter? What more valuable contribution than a dose of purpose?
But ultimately that is not Professor Hibbitts’ legacy, because his vision and reach has expanded to students who’ll never see his captive presentation at 1L Orientation, or admire his natty tweed sport coats, or try to square his unending politesse with his yelling “come!” when there’s a knock on his office door, or marvel at his ability to adulate and wither by adding “in a variety of ways” to the end of an observation. Ultimately, his legacy is that his passion for this project has been turned into an institution, with participants and admirers around the globe, and solidified into a course of theory and practice that can self-perpetuate.
To be sure, Professor Hibbitts did not accomplish this by himself, as he would doubtlessly be the first to tell you. It’s been a group project thirty years in the making, with casual participants and fanatical devotees. It’s been a career for one of the smartest, hardest-working people I know, on whom I know Professor Hibbitts has relied throughout the years.
And that’s rather the point. Professor Hibbitts could have been Alexander the Great or Hannibal, leading his army from the front, only to leave a leaderless army in the general’s absence. Instead, he’s built a structure, a culture and an organization that can thrive without his hand on the tiller.
But listen to me, talking about him like he’s passed on! Of course, he’s alive and well, ready to turn the nuclear spotlight of his intellect and attention to other pursuits. I trust, as I’m sure we all do, that that means fewer gray Pittsburgh winter days, fewer mandatory meetings, and the complete absence of Estates & Trusts papers to grade. I find myself quite overwhelmed at the idea that Professor Hibbitts can pursue whatever (inevitably nerdy and obscure) thing strikes his fancy, comfortable in the knowledge that the project to which he devoted a substantial part of his adult life will persist. For the first time since teaching himself HTML in 1996 to stand up the first iteration, he can finally assume a new role for which he is uniquely qualified: a JURIST reader.
Andrew Morgan currently serves as Counsel at PNC, where he specializes in technology and intellectual property law. As a student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he graduated in 2011, he ascended the editorial ranks as a JURIST student staffer before working with its professional staff as Executive Director between 2012 and 2018.
