Before I ever met Gary Schwartz, I had read his wonderful pieces on products liability and contributory negligence. I therefore knew that he not only had the amazing capacity to wrap his arms around an entire field, but also a willingness to roll up his sleeves and slog through hundreds of nineteenth-century appellate opinions to see whether the received wisdom about contributory negligence was correct. He was an impressive legal scholar at a time when I was just starting out in law teaching, and I admired him because of his work.
What I did not know merely from reading Gary's work, however, was how much he loved everything that had to do with tort law. I was later to learn that he could talk torts, and would talk torts, from morning until night if he had people who would listen to him and to whom he could listen. Talking torts with Gary involved real conversation. He was not an ideologue; he did not zealously seek to convert his listeners. He was a seeker of truth, not someone who had already found it whole.