Robert M. Cover was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1942. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1965, and magna cum laude from Columbia Law School in 1968. Immediately on graduation, he joined the Columbia Law School faculty as an assistant professor, where he taught until 1972. From 1971 to 1972 he was a visiting senior lecturer in Law and American Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He joined the Yale Law School faculty as a professor of law in 1972. Ten years later, he was appointed Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, a position he held until his untimely death at the age of 42.

At Yale, Professor Cover taught courses in American legal history, law and American slavery, constitutional law, civil procedure, and federal courts and federal jurisdiction. A scholar of history, philosophy and literature, as well as law, he was the author of the multidisciplinary analysis Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process, which received Harvard Law School's prestigious Ames Prize for significant books in law. He was also the author (with Yale Law School Professor Owen Fiss) of The Structure of Procedure, and a casebook (co-authored with Fiss and Professor Judith Resnik), Procedure, which was published after his death. A leading figure in the Jewish community at Yale, Cover's research also included important work in Jewish legal history. At the time of his death, he was in the process of translating a 16th-century Hebrew text on the law of jurisdiction.

Deeply committed to civil rights, civil liberty and social justice, Cover did not shrink from acting on his commitments. He served a three-week jail term in Albany, Georgia in the early 1960s as a result of his involvement with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its voting rights campaign. He brought an unsuccessful suit challenging the loyalty oath required for acceptance to the New York state bar, and did not become a member of that bar until 1984, when the oath requirement was dropped. In the early 1980s, Cover was a leading faculty supporter of Yale's clerical and technical workers' attempts to unionize, an effort that was ultimately successful. He also assisted Yale students arrested during campus protests in early 1986 against Yale's policy of investing in companies doing business with South Africa, and was appointed by then-Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti to chair an ad hoc committee monitoring a shanty-town erected on university property by student protestors.

Professor Cover was admired as much for his teaching as for his scholarship. In recognition of this, in 1992 Yale Law School established the Robert M. Cover Fellowship in Clinical Teaching. Initial funding for the program, which provides for the training of clinical legal educators, was provided by a grant from the Legal Services Corporation.

 Before his sudden death in 1986 at the age of 42, Cover envisioned an annual retreat at which law students, public interest practitioners and academics could share their experiences and aspirations. SALT has made his vision come true every year since his death by gathering together public interest students, lawyers and teachers at Camp Sargeant, a retreat in rural New Hampshire. The success of these gatherings led SALT to create two similar events in other parts of the country--one in the west honoring the memory of Trina Grillo and another in the midwest in memory of Norman Amaker.

Simple recitations of Professor Cover's professional positions and scholarly and teaching accomplishments do not adequately describe his life, however. As Cover's friend and colleague Stephen Wizner, the William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has said, "It would be a mistake to think of him just as a legal scholar. He wrote articles for a living, but believed that one way you 'repair' the world was to act as a kind, compassionate person."

You can learn more about the  remarkable qualities of Bob Cover in Tributes to Robert Cover, 96 Yale L. J. 1069 (1987).