David Robinson, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Law, passed away on Sunday, March 29, 2020, at the age of 92.
Professor Emeritus Robinson taught at GW Law for nearly four decades from 1965 to 2003. He obtained a BA from Reed College and a JD from Columbia Law School. He then returned to Portland, clerking for Justice Hall Lusk on the Oregon Supreme Court, and later began a career as a criminal prosecutor. He served both in the District Attorney's Office in Multnomah County, and in the US Attorney's Office in Portland, rising to the post of Chief Criminal Deputy District Attorney.
In 1963, he accepted a teaching fellowship at Harvard Law School. Since attending law school, he had wanted to teach law and he saw the fellowship as his path to a teaching career. In the second year of that fellowship, he was hired as an Associate Professor at GW Law. That began a 38-year run at the law school, where he specialized in criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence.
Professor Emeritus Robinson also served as a consultant to the National Commission on Reform of the Federal Criminal Law and was for five years a consultant to the US Department of Justice. In the 1980s, he became interested in legal aspects of the AIDS crisis. That interest led to a law review article, "AIDS and the Criminal Law," which appeared in the Hofstra Law Review in 1985, and a book chapter, "Criminal Sanctions and Quarantine," which appears in the 1992 book AIDS and the Law.