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. 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 fourth entry in this ongoing series.
If there was ever a model for other law professors to measure themselves by, it is Professor Bernie Hibbitts. His retirement leaves a massive hole in the law faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, but his legacy leaves us all better for having had him as a part of our academic community. Bernie has always been among the most unassuming colleagues one could imagine. He is like a book whose cover provides only a limited understanding of the richness of the pages inside. His impact has been, and will continue to be, felt in many ways.
Bernie is a scholar par-excellence of legal history. His office always contained more books, stacked in more ways in more places, than any I have ever seen. It was easy to gather from any discussion with Bernie that, not only had he read all of them, but he always knew exactly where each one was and had a near perfect recollection of the contents of each one. And he could explain that legal history in ways that engaged and excited students – as I saw many times when he would speak to Pitt Law LL.M. students in my Introduction to American Law class about the history of the common law in the United States. His was always a session the students remembered and discussed.
But, it was not the past that was Bernie’s real scholarly strength, it was always the future that built on that past. This is, of course, exemplified in Last Writes? Reassessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace, published in 1996 in the New York University Law Review. That article was the first by a law professor to have been posted first on the World Wide Web, prior to its law review publication. That was a process that was seen as not only unusual but odd. But it was the original example of just about every law review article of today. As he predicted, that process “would give legal writers more control over the substance and form of their scholarship, would create more opportunities for spontaneity and creativity, and would promote more direct dialogue among legal thinkers.” But, contrary to his prediction, it did not “sound the death knell for law reviews in their present form.” In fact, it may have enhanced them and led to their transition to the final step in the iterative process of legal scholarship. It thus proved the value of the process Bernie initiated that is now followed by every law professor with just about every new law review or journal article.
Bernie is best known as the creator of JURIST, the legal news source powered by law students from around the globe, and that is appropriate. It is appropriate because, whether in his teaching or in his scholarship, students were always at the center of his work. He not only taught them, he demonstrated a personal interest in their education, their careers, and their personal lives. That is what transforms a professor into a teacher – and Bernie was the consummate teacher. I saw it when he led discussions in the Introduction to American Law course. I saw it as he brought first Pitt Law students, and ultimately students from around the globe, into the JURIST framework for reporting and influencing the law. I saw it when he connected with those students in countries of conflict and personally worked to bring them to safety and advance their individual careers – in ways that went far beyond the classroom, the normal mentoring process, or any role we normally ascribe to a law professor.
Bernie’s was always a process steeped in the best of humanity. His purpose was to educate, but always in a fashion that made life better for those being educated. For Bernie, JURIST was, yes, a legal news source that brought information no other journalistic platform was able to match; but it was (and is) a foundation for the development of a new generation of legal scholar-leaders. It is a path for involvement in understanding the world through a legal lens for every student involved, and a platform from which each of those students can move forward to greater impact on their world through an understanding of and the ability to enhance the rule of law. Bernie understood from the beginning, on a level I have seen in few others, that legal education is a personal matter that can have impact on a global scale; that rule of law is a fundamental value we must all seek to understand, enhance, and cherish.
So, Bernie Hibbitts, using a foundation as a legal historian, has had an outsized impact on the future: the future of legal education; the future of legal scholarship; the future of reporting on legal developments across the world; but, most importantly, the future of the individual lives of those he has touched along the way. Those lives will be lived in ways that change the world because of the impact Bernie Hibbitts had on them.
Professor Ronald A. Brand is the Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where JURIST was established nearly 30 years ago. Professor Brand was the founding Director of Pitt Law’s Center for International Legal Education (CILE), its Master of Laws Program for Foreign Law Graduates (LL.M.), and its Doctor of Juridical Studies (SJD) program. He has taught in many countries around the globe and his scholarship is regularly cited throughout the world.
