8 minute read
Legal Warrior
OUR COMMUNITY
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 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. Y ou might not think Sens. Mitch because I’ve been so busy, but we are old!” McConnell and Gary Peters had he said with a laugh, “and I realize I want to anything in common. They are be retired! I don’t want to do anything!” on opposite sides of nearly That seems hard to believe. Though every important issue. The on paper, Sedler turns 86 on Sept. 11, he dour Senate minority leader doesn’t look, or act, his age. When Dana is nearly old enough to be Nessel, another Sedler alum, was elected the hard-working Michigan Michigan attorney general in 2018, she Democrat’s father. immediately made him an (unpaid) special Robert But they do share something assistant AG. Sedler no other two U.S. senators When she heard her mentor was finally do: Both are former law students of Robert retiring, she said, “Bob Sedler’s impact is “Bob” Sedler, now Wayne State University’s immense and far-reaching. He has instilled Distinguished Professor of Constitutional an understanding of the law in generations Law, who earlier taught at the University of of students, many of whom now serve in Kentucky. this very department. The guidance and
They are far from the only famous law- mentorship he provided to many young yers to have been trained by Sedler, who legal minds is beyond comparison.” has had an enormous impact on the legal She’s far from alone in thinking that. profession and the law itself, nationally and During his career, Sedler has argued and internationally. won two cases before the U.S. Supreme
However, while it is entirely possible that Court, helped make same-sex marriage a more of his former students will become nationally recognized constitutional right famous in the future, there won’t be any and successfully fought more civil rights more Sedler alumni after this year. This cases than can be easily counted. month, Bob Sedler is finally retiring. He’s consulted with the late Supreme
“It’s time — I’m ready to retire,” he said Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, met with a large grin during an interview in his President Barack Obama at the White Southfield home, decorated largely with House, had a major impact on legal issues furniture and art collected during a lifetime in Michigan and has spoken all over the of world travel. That all started in 1963, world. when he and his wife, Rozanne, who had “Rozanne and I have had an incredible just earned a master’s in social work, went life,” he said. His wife, and partner in everyto Ethiopia as part of a Ford Foundation thing, is a clinical and geriatric social workproject to teach and help set up a law school er who also recently retired from Jewish in that country. Family Service.
“You know, I hadn’t really noticed Not bad for a man who was born during
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
Sedler received the Champion of Justice Award from the Michigan Association for Justice May 11, 2019.
— ATTORNEY GENERAL DANA NESSEL
Rozanne and Bob in Panama in July 2019
in Ethiopia. Not until the international edition Newsweek arrived did they really know what had happened.
They ended up staying in Ethiopia three years.
While there, Bob wrote a legal textbook for Ethiopian law students, which “as far as I know may still be in use.”
When they returned, he taught at the University of Kentucky law school till 1977, where his students included McConnell, an Alabama native who went on to run Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. “I don’t know if he would remember me, but he might — if not from law school, probably from the school busing controversy in Louisville.”
Indeed, Sedler battled successfully to desegregate the Louisville schools by getting the courts to approve cross-district busing with suburban school districts — something that the U.S. Supreme Court in Bradley v Milliken rejected for the Detroit area in 1974.
He also battled in the courts on behalf of draft resistors and others who got in trouble for protesting the Vietnam War.
In perhaps his most brilliant legal move, he figured out how to end discrimination in housing law in a socially conservative state where, despite the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, politicians were unwilling to vote for anything called a “fair housing act.”
Instead, he negotiated to get Kentucky to pass what was billed a “bill to regulate commercial real estate transactions.” It meant that homeowners were free to sell their homes to whomever they chose if they didn’t use a real estate agent. But since more than 95 percent of them did, it had the effect of getting discrimination out of the housing market.
Despite his success, Sedler said, “I knew I was never going to stay in Kentucky. Detroit was a city that felt very much like home to me, like Pittsburgh, and I was very happy when the opportunity came up at Wayne State.”
MICHIGAN ACTIVISM
The Sedlers arrived in 1977, moved to Southfield and became and remain active members of Temple Emanu-El in Oak Park. Though not conventionally devout, both Sedlers are committed and active members of social action and the Reform community.
Though he was incredibly devoted to his students, Sedler, as he had in Kentucky, also plunged into social justice causes in Michigan, frequently working pro bono (as a volunteer) with the American Civil Liberties Union.
He battled successfully against Dearborn’s attempt to prohibit “non-residents” (meaning African Americans from nearby Detroit) from using city parks. Sedler has opposed all religious displays on public property and fought successfully to stop Michigan from preventing a white couple from adopting a black child.
Sedler hasn’t been afraid to raise eyebrows; he alienated some supporters by supporting Jack Kevorkian’s right to provide assisted suicide in the 1990s, and others by supporting the late Matty Moroun’s attempt to prevent another Detroit River bridge.
But he made perhaps his greatest impact when a former student came to him to ask his advice on how to prepare a federal case involving two lesbian nurses, Jayne Rowse and April DeBoer, who wanted to jointly adopt three children but who were not allowed to do so by the state of Michigan. When it was over, Sedler’s advice not only helped them establish same-sex adoption but same sex marriage as a constitutional right throughout the nation.
The young lawyer who came to him for advice is now Michigan’s attorney general, who said of her mentor that “his unyielding belief that our constitutional rights encompass more than just lines on pieces of paper” were her inspiration.
Along the way, Sedler has received almost too many awards to count, from Phi Beta Kappa to the Order of the Coif; to State Bar and ACLU awards and the Michigan Association for Justice’s Champion of Justice Award “for his dedication to the cause of justice and making a real difference in people’s lives.”
He has also written a book that has gone through multiple editions, Constitutional Law in the United States.
Now, he has finally taught his last class. But when it comes to the public arena, will he really remain fully retired?
In this case … there may, indeed, be reasonable doubt.
