IN MEMORIAM: James McClellan, RIP
Landess, Thomas H.
IN MEMORIAM THOMAS H. LANDESS James McClellan, RIP IM MCCLELLAN was handicapped by his own virtues. He was too creative and forthright to be comfortable in the academy, where all the dullards...
...Thomas Jefferson being dead, Jim was the man to contact when you wanted to know what a phrase or an amendment meant...
...Had they been allowed to finish the project, it might have been the most significant recovery of a political past in modern intellectual history...
...With his good friend M.E...
...Friends of Jim McClellan would trade all that for one more long evening of conversation with the man...
...Though he earned a JD from the prestigious University of Virginia Law School, he was too fond of the law to practice it...
...He was too creative and forthright to be comfortable in the academy, where all the dullards were department chairmen and all the trimmers were deans...
...He could have taught the gaggle of senators on the committee a thing or two about Separation if they hadn't been too busy promoting its opposite...
...and wrote Liberty, Order, Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government (1989...
...Bradford, he undertook to edit, with notes and commentary, a six-volume edition of Jonathon Elliot's Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution...
...as well as numerous articles and shorter works...
...Quiet-spoken yet openhearted, with a subtle wit and a memory for what is worth preserving and re-telling, he was the best company of all when you were at a professional meeting and didn't want to listen to the academic papers downstairs...
...No one knew better than Jim what that phrase meant...
...Jim was a sensible Virginian...
...Nobody on the planet understood federalism better than Jim McClellan...
...published a surprisingly sympathetic study of Massachusetts associate justice and legal scholar Joseph Story (Joseph Story and the American Constitution (1971...
...When a significant scholar dies, scribes tend to focus on his intellectual legacy, particularly those who didn't know him...
...You just called him and took notes...
...in Political Science at the University of Virginia and taught Constitutional Law and related subjects at the University of Alabama, Emory University, Hampden-Sydney College, Claremont McKenna College, and the University of London...
...March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...He co-authored a book with Russell Kirk (The Political Principles of Robert Taft,1967...
...Yet he earned a Ph.D...
...Jefferson had an ideological streak a mile wide...
...In fact, between Jefferson and McClellan you'd do well to choose McClellan...
...He came to the study of the Constitution with the sensibilities of its authors and with an intuitive grasp of the world in which they lived...
...His death is one more reminder to those of us who loved him and grew old with him that we all live in the shadow of God's closing hand...
...From 1981 to 1983, he served on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers...
...However, the two volumes they did complete are probably worth more than the entire inventory of books published during the bicentennial of the Constitution...
Vol. 38 • March 2005 • No. 2
