Anne C. Fleming, Updated with Link to Georgetown Law Center Memorial Page
The Legal History Blog has a fitting tribute post here. Since we cannot improve on what was written there, we share some excerpts. As the first excerpt indicates, more tributes and remembrances will follow:
Anne C. Fleming, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, died suddenly Tuesday night from an embolism. We at the blog were fortunate to know her and we join her colleagues, students, friends, and family in mourning her passing. This post will not do justice to her life, but it is a first attempt to recognize the many ways in which she enriched our field. We know that more remembrances will follow; when they do, we will post them here.
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Anne joined Georgetown’s law faculty in 2014. In that year she also published “The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the ‘Law of the Poor,’” which placed Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Company in the context of a statutory transformation of consumer protection law. The article remains revered by contracts law teachers for the way it reframes a canonical case.
Anne’s book, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, 2018), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the annual book prize of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and the Ralph Gomory Book Prize of the Business History Conference . . .
At her untimely death, Anne had entered a new and ambitious phase of her scholarly career. For example, her 2019 article “The Public Interest in the Private Law of the Poor” explored “uncharted connections between private law and poverty law,” showing “how concerns about public spending on poor relief have shaped debates over the private law of the poor for over a century.” The article was aimed not only at legal historians and scholars of poverty law, but also at scholars of law and economics and policymakers concerned with contemporary economic inequality.Anne was also fully embarked on an enormously exciting book project, “Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960.”. . .Her colleagues, students, and fellow historians all remember her warmth, generosity, utter lack of pretension, and above all her kindness. A colleague at South Brooklyn Legal Services recalled her as “fiercely dedicated to her clients, a brilliant and selfless advocate.” Tom Sugrue, one of her dissertation advisors writes that she was “quietly brilliant and deeply humane.” “Losing a good scholar is bad enough,” writes Bruce Mann, who advised her when she was a Climenko, “but losing such a good person is far worse.”We at the blog will miss her dearly and treasure her memory.
— Dan Ernst, Mitra Sharafi, and Karen Tani