Faust Frank Rossi Died 3/6/24 (3/17/24)

Faust Frank Rossi died on 3/6/24. His obituary is here. It is quite a record of accomplishment.

The obit described his time at DOJ Tax as follows:

He graduated from Cornell Law School in 1960 and began his legal career as a trial attorney with the United States Department of Justice Honors Program in Washington, DC.

I was also interested in his teaching at Cornell Law School starting in the 1960s. Here is an excerpt:

In 1966, Faust joined the faculty of Cornell Law School where he taught Evidence, Civil Procedure, and Trial Advocacy. He was an enormously popular and energetic teacher. He brought the law to life for generations of students with memorable hypotheticals populated by purported denizens of his “old neighborhood,” Spano, Mrs. Garibaldi, Delvecchio, Madge, Yukel, and baby Grutz. He was a national winner of the Roscoe Pound Jacobson Award for Excellence in Teaching Trial Advocacy. It is estimated that Faust taught more students at Cornell Law School than any other professor in its 137-year history. He also served as the Associate Academic Dean. When he retired from Cornell Law School in 2013, The School honored Faust’s career by naming one of its annual moot court competitions The Faust F. Rossi Moot Court Competition.

Throughout his career, Faust authored and co-authored numerous books including Expert Witnesses, Evidence for the Trial Lawyer, and The New York Evidence Handbook. In 2016, Faust authored with Professor Glenn C. Altschuler, the acclaimed book Ten Great American Trials: Lessons in Advocacy. Faust gave hundreds of Continuing Legal Education lectures to lawyers and judges in the United States and Europe. He reached over a hundred thousand law students with his popular bar review lectures and nationally distributed "Law School Legends" audio and video series on Evidence. Faust was a recurring visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest and a regular faculty member in the joint Cornell/Paris 1 Summer Institute of International and Comparative Law. During his career he was a visiting law professor at Oxford University, the University of Siena, New York University, Emory University, University of San Diego, and Georgetown University. He also taught for many years at the annual National Institute for Trial Advocacy.

The services are:

Friends will be received at Pumphrey’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase Funeral Home, 7557 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814 on Tuesday, March 19th from 6pm – 8pm. A Mass of Christian Burial will be at St. Jane Frances de Chantal Catholic Church, 9701 Old Georgetown Rd, Bethesda, MD 20814 on Wednesday, March 20th at 11:00am. A livestream link will be available. Interment will follow at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, 13801 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20906.

JAT Note: I bold-faced the excerpt above to raise the question (I don’t know the answer) of whether Rossi’s teaching style was similar to the style of Jean Shepard—populated with such mythical or not characters as Ralphie Parker and others that we grew up loving.