Times Picayune - Tulane law professor dies on Florida beach
Nonprofit foundation set up to provide legal assistance
- Susan Finch, Staff writer

Longtime Tulane Law School professor David Gelfand died Sunday afternoon on Pensacola Beach in Florida according to the Escambia County Sheriff's Office. He was 56.

Witnesses saw Gelfand walking toward the beach through shallow water, then turn and walk back toward the Gulf a moment before falling face-first into the water, according to the Pensacola News-Journal.

An autopsy was done Monday to determine whether Gelfand died from drowning or a medical condition.

Results were not immediately available, Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Ted Roy said.

Gelfand, a world-renowned scholar in constitutional law, and his wife, Mary, had gone to Pensacola to visit Gelfand's 91-year-old mother, said Bryan Mauldin, a longtime Gelfand friend, former student and fellow law professor.

Gelfand's death came the same day as a public announcement in New Orleans that he and other Tulane Law School faculty, alumni and friends had formed a nonprofit foundation called From the Lake to the River to marshal law students, law professors and law firms from across the nation to provide legal aid and disaster relief to Hurricane Katrina victims.

"We have lost an extraordinary legal mind that lived inside an extraordinarily compassionate and giving person," said Mauldin, who was working with Gelfand

Mauldin said that when she and Gelfand chatted on the phone Sunday afternoon about what they hoped the foundation could accomplish, he was "upbeat and energized. We were discussing the right of return of New Orleans evacuees and how to provide housing and jobs and reconstruction."

Gelfand, born in Buffalo, N.Y., was a magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University in political science who earned a master's degree in politics and jurisprudence at England's Oxford University and a law degree from Columbia Law School.

Except for a year teaching at the University of Miami, Gelfand spent his entire career on the Tulane Law School faculty, where he held the Ashton Phelps chair of constitutional law.

He taught at schools around the world, including those in Japan, Germany, Liberia, Kenya, Finland, and Holland.

Tulane Law School Dean Larry Ponoroff informed school students and faculty of Gelfand's death on Monday by e-mail. "We are all deeply saddened by this loss."

Gelfand is survived by his wife; their 23-year-old daughter, Katie; and Gelfand's mother.

Funeral arrangements for Gelfand were pending Monday.

- Sept. 27, 2005

Reprinted with permission of the Times Picayune.