We meet to celebrate John Ely's life and work. No greater tribute is possible for a scholar, I know John would agree, than a meeting of other scholars to discuss his work and to mark his contributions. I was fortunate to meet John Ely early in our professional lives. He was one of several outstanding young lawyers I met while clerking in Washington, D.C., between 1965 and 1967. The Vietnam War drew us together again some years later, as we both worked on legal issues related to that war. We rarely met, but I followed his work, and he mine. In 1994, after he had published War and Responsibility, (1) the University of Miami School of Law held a symposium on the book, in which I participated at John's invitation. My paper praised John's effort to get Congress to act more responsibly on war-related issues, but it criticized John's recommendations on how to bring about that result. (2)
