Son of Jewish Immigrant Appointed Dean of Yale Law School

Abraham Samuel Goldstein, son of a Ukrainian emigrant who became a pushcart peddler on New York’s Lower East Side, was appointed yesterday as dean of the Yale Law School, effective July 1. Mr. Goldstein, 44, a former trial lawyer, joined the school in 1956 as an associate professor, becoming a full professor in 1961 and acceding to the endowed William Nelson Cromwell Chair in 1968. He is a specialist in criminal law. Fleming James, chairman of the faculty committee that made the selection, described Mr. Goldstein as “a man with strong and imaginative ideas about the future of legal education,” and Charles L. Black, one of the new dean’s professorial colleagues, called him “a legal scholar of the first order.”

Mr. Goldstein was born July 27, 1925, in Manhattan, the fourth child of Yiddish-speaking Isadore and Yetta Goldstein. An economics major at City College, in New York, he was graduated from Yale Law School in 1949. “I’m very aggressively in favor of lots of changes,” the appointee said yesterday, “but I want to be very careful to tailor them to who our students are and what we uniquely can do with our students.” In a personal portrait of the new dean. The New York Times noted that Mr. Goldstein’s colleagues refer to him as “scholarly,” “judicious,” “thoughtful,” “powerful.” “determined” and “stubborn.”

(In Canada, Ernest Sirluck, 51, the son of a Russian immigrant who farmed in Western Canada and before that in Argentina, became the second Jewish university president. He will resign his twin posts as dean of graduate studies at the University of Toronto and graduate vice president to accept the presidency of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Himself a Western Canadian by birth and a graduate of the University he will now head. Dr. Sirluck taught English literature at the University of Chicago before he entered university administration.)