photo by Wyatt McSpadden (Courtesy of University of Texas at Austin School of Law)
The LSU Law Center is saddened to report the death of LSU Law alum and former faculty member, Professor David W. Robertson. Prof. Robertson was a distinguished faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin Law School and holder of the William Powers, Jr. and Kim L. Heilbrun Chair in Tort Law. He was a Distinguished Teaching Professor.
Prof. Robertson had a 50-year career as a teacher and scholar at U.T. Austin. He was one of the nation’s leading authorities on the law of admiralty and an important scholar in the field of torts. He taught both subjects to many thousands of students.
Prof. Robertson also had a long history with the LSU Law Center. He graduated The Order of the Coif in 1961 and was managing editor of the LA Law Review. He first joined the LSU Law faculty in 1962-63 to try his hand at teaching following a successful fellowship with Senator Russell B. Long in Washington, D.C. In his early years on faculty, the professor served as an advisor to the moot court program and also inaugurated a program of written critiques of students’ preliminary briefs. Prof. Robertson stayed on the LSU Law faculty in ’63-’64 but left pursue his LLM as a Sterling Fellow at Yale. He returned as a visiting faculty member to LSU Law in 1974-75 to cover Professor Wex Malone’s tort courses.
While his teaching career brought him to Texas, Prof. Robertson always retained an ongoing interest in LA Tort Law and procedure. He was also engaged with the Law Center’s Pugh Institute for Justice, serving as a member of the Advisory board in honor of continuing relationship with George Pugh, also a Sterling Fellow at Yale.
In December 2017, The Honorable John deGravelles and Jan deGravelles established an endowed scholarship and an extraordinary annual scholarship at the LSU Law Center, to be awarded to a student each year in Professor Robertson’s honor.
We express our deepest sympathies to his family and law school community.
