The Sedler family: Erik Sedler, Marla Sedler, Chole Sedler, Rozanne and Bob Sedler, Braden Sedler, Tom Foster, Beth Foster, Brielle Foster, Jayce Foster
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Legal Warrior
Retiring WSU law professor looks back on a lifetime of accomplishments. JACK LESSENBERRY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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ou might not think Sens. Mitch McConnell and Gary Peters had anything in common. They are on opposite sides of nearly every important issue. The dour Senate minority leader is nearly old enough to be the hard-working Michigan Democrat’s father. Robert But they do share something Sedler no other two U.S. senators do: Both are former law students of Robert “Bob” Sedler, now Wayne State University’s Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law, who earlier taught at the University of Kentucky. They are far from the only famous lawyers to have been trained by Sedler, who has had an enormous impact on the legal profession and the law itself, nationally and internationally. However, while it is entirely possible that more of his former students will become famous in the future, there won’t be any more Sedler alumni after this year. This month, Bob Sedler is finally retiring. “It’s time — I’m ready to retire,” he said with a large grin during an interview in his Southfield home, decorated largely with furniture and art collected during a lifetime of world travel. That all started in 1963, when he and his wife, Rozanne, who had just earned a master’s in social work, went to Ethiopia as part of a Ford Foundation project to teach and help set up a law school in that country. “You know, I hadn’t really noticed
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because I’ve been so busy, but we are old!” he said with a laugh, “and I realize I want to be retired! I don’t want to do anything!” That seems hard to believe. Though on paper, Sedler turns 86 on Sept. 11, he doesn’t look, or act, his age. When Dana Nessel, another Sedler alum, was elected Michigan attorney general in 2018, she immediately made him an (unpaid) special assistant AG. When she heard her mentor was finally retiring, she said, “Bob Sedler’s impact is immense and far-reaching. He has instilled an understanding of the law in generations of students, many of whom now serve in this very department. The guidance and mentorship he provided to many young legal minds is beyond comparison.” She’s far from alone in thinking that. During his career, Sedler has argued and won two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, helped make same-sex marriage a nationally recognized constitutional right and successfully fought more civil rights cases than can be easily counted. He’s consulted with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, met President Barack Obama at the White House, had a major impact on legal issues in Michigan and has spoken all over the world. “Rozanne and I have had an incredible life,” he said. His wife, and partner in everything, is a clinical and geriatric social worker who also recently retired from Jewish Family Service. Not bad for a man who was born during
the Great Depression in Pittsburgh to parents who came to this country as children by families who were escaping oppression in Czarist Russia. (The name was originally Seder, but, as often the case, was anglicized by immigration officials, probably at Ellis Island.) To say there was little money when Sedler was growing up in a tiny, crowded house was an understatement. His father never went beyond elementary school. But Bob was determined to become a lawyer; he competed successfully for scholarships and worked part-time and summers as a shoe salesman for nine years. MEETING ROZANNE But his hero as a student was not Benjamin Cardozo or Felix Frankfurter, but a lawyer who inspired thousands of idealistic young people of Sedler’s generation: Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Sedler was head of Students for Stevenson at the University of Pittsburgh in 1956 in his first year in law school. A picture appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of Bob, in his first year of law school, standing on a soap box at a Stevenson rally. The former Rozanne Friedlander, then a student at Penn State, saw his picture. Stevenson was crushed in a historic landslide, but Rozanne and Bob did end up meeting — and marrying in 1960. Their son Erik now is the managing director and founder of Kivvit, a public relations and consulting firm that is the successor to a firm Sedler co-founded with Obama adviser David Axelrod. Their daughter Beth is a social worker in Los Angeles; each has two children. After a brief stint in the Army (“I was worried about the drill where we had to throw live grenades”), he taught briefly at Rutgers and then St. Louis University when the opportunity came up to go to Ethiopia. “All life is happenstance. I looked at Rozanne — we were 28 and 25; we had no children yet, and why not?” Two months later, they were lying in bed in Addis Ababa in the middle of the night when the phone rang. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated they were told. No additional details were known. That was an era before television or trans-Atlantic phone calls were possible
