Our colleague and friend Daniel Murray passed away late Saturday night. Daniel joined the faculty in 1957 and taught and wrote primarily in the commercial law and international sales fields until he retired in 1996. He was recognized as the outstanding teacher of the year several times, the Inter-American Law Review awarded Daniel the Lawyer of the Americas Award in 1987, he served for many years as the faculty advisor to the University of Miami Law Review and he was a prolific scholar. Our students often affectionately referred to him as “Shotgun Murray” because of his rapid fire delivery of his commercial law lectures. We all will miss Daniel
There will be a funeral Mass at San Augustine Catholic Church and Campus Ministry (located at the intersection of San Amaro and Miller Drive) on Thursday, March 4th at 1:00 p.m. Immediately following this memorial service, there will be a reception at the School of Law. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that donations be made to the Daniel E. Murray Law Review Scholarship Fund at the Law School.
Dan Murray was part of a somewhat vanishing breed of law professor—one whose scholarly career was not much theory-driven, but was mostly about being a master technician. He wanted better and clearer rules, and he wanted to explain the impact of the rules we had. I've always thought that even (especially?) very intellectual and theory-oriented law faculties such as ours should make a bigger place for, and value more highly, the kind of scholarship Dan produced.
By the time I got here, Dan was in the endgame of his career, but he was still writing articles with titles like “Liability of the State and Its Employees in the Mishandling of Security Interests Under Commercial Codes and Motor Vehicle Laws,” “The Extension of Damage and Time Limitations of the Hague, Warsaw and Lausanne Conventions to Agents and Independent Contractors of Shiplines and Airlines,” and “Substitutes for Letters of Credit Sales: A Seller's Lot Is Not a Happy One.” And even after he retired, he kept coming in and keeping up until his health made that too difficult.
We crossed paths for the last time only two weeks ago, at the doctor's office, and he looked frail. “I'm feeling old” he said, but he made a joke of it.
