SOUTHFIELD, MI – Nine years ago, a young lawyer went to see her old law professor to ask for help with a case. Dana Nessel was trying to help a lesbian couple, two nurses who had three children, all adopted by one or the other of them. They wanted legally to be both parents to all the children. But the state refused.
They were getting nowhere. State courts were not sympathetic. Neither was the man who was then Michigan Attorney General, Bill Schuette. The nurses couldn’t marry, because Michigan had a law against same-sex unions. Their only hope was federal court.
They knew Robert Sedler, a distinguished professor of constitutional law at Wayne State University, had won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and asked him to help them prepare a case.
“It was absolutely the right thing to do and a privilege to be involved,” Sedler said. He suggested fighting not only against the ban on same-sex adoption, but to argue that Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage was itself unconstitutional.
Two years later, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman agreed, ruling that both Michigan’s ban against same-sex adoption and same- sex marriage was unconstitutional. The next year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. “That was really something,” the law professor said.
It wouldn’t be too much to say that Professor Sedler himself is really something. While at the University of Kentucky in the 1970s, he successfully battled to desegregate the Louisville schools. He used a brilliant legal maneuver to get the Kentucky Legislature to end discrimination in housing, and spent three years in Ethiopia trying to help move that African nation to a modern legal system.
But now, he is at last retiring. “It’s time,” he said over lunch in a home decorated with art and objects accumulated in a lifetime of travel. Sedler, who turns 86 on Sept. 11, said “I’ve really hadn’t noticed because I’ve been so busy, but I am old!”
The same-sex marriage case changed many things.
Today, Dana Nessel is not just a lawyer who won a big case – she is Michigan’s first-ever female attorney general, and one of her first acts in office was to make her old mentor a special assistant.
“Bob Sedler’s impact is immense and far-reaching. I am thankful for all Bob has taught me, and his dedicated service to the people of this state,” she said when I told her he was retiring.
“His unyielding belief that our constitutional rights encompass more than just lines on pieces of paper has been demonstrated through his profound body of work, both in the classroom and the courtroom.”
Not bad for someone who was born in poverty in Pittsburgh, to immigrant Jewish parents from Czarist Russia who had neither money nor much education; his father never completed elementary school. But from his youth, Sedler was determined to be a lawyer.
He was inspired mainly by a man who became his idol: Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president twice in the 1950s. Stevenson lost badly, but he affected Sedler’s life in many ways.
Not only did he motivate the young law student towards a career in public service, he may have helped him find a wife. Rozanne Friedlander saw a picture of Bob in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, standing on a soap box addressing students at a Stevenson rally.
They eventually met, married in 1961, and have been together ever since; besides raising a son and daughter, Rozanne Sedler became a highly respected geriatric social worker.
Besides his other accomplishments, Sedler has a few unique claims to fame. He is one thing — possibly the only thing –U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell, (R-KY) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) have in common; both were former law students of his.
“Oh, I suppose Mitch would remember me, if not from class, if you asked him about the Louisville school busing controversy,” Sedler said. The young law professor helped desegregate the Louisville schools by successfully getting the courts to approve a cross-district busing plan of the kind that was rejected in Detroit.
He also consulted Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then still in private practice, for her advice on how to win gender discrimination cases in Kentucky before he moved to Detroit in 1977.
But perhaps his oddest adventure came in his late 20s, when, soon after they were married, he and Rozanne took up a Ford Foundation challenge and taught law for three years in Ethiopia.
One night they were in bed and the phone rang. “A Peace Corps volunteer said ‘President Kennedy has been assassinated. We don’t have any details,’ and it was three days before the international edition of Newsweek arrived and we found out what had happened.
Sedler would go on to write a legal textbook that, “as far as I know,” is still in use in Ethiopia, and a later book, Constitutional Law in the United States, which has been published internationally.
Now, he claims he is finally, really, going to retire. “I don’t want to do anything!” he laughs … before he starts talking about revising a major article on the Supreme Court. As far as his promise to do nothing is concerned, there is certainly reasonable doubt.
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