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Joseph Madison Beck, JD, Adjunct Professor of Law, retired

Mr. Beck has served as lead counsel in some of the most important IP cases in the United States, and several of his reported cases are now included in standard law school case books. As a result, he has taught Emory Law students some of the unpublished reasons he won (and once lost) cases such as Estate of Martin Luther King v. C B S, Rosa Parks v Outkast, the Gone with the Wind v The Wind Done Gone book case, the Superman/Wonder Woman v Super Stud/ Wonder Wench case, and lawsuits involving his defense of Sacha Baron Cohen a/k/a Borat. Mr. Beck has been asked to discuss his cases at law schools including Harvard, Stanford, The University of Texas, Duke and other U. S. schools; and by the State Department in countries ranging from Russia and the Balkans to India.

Prior to moving to Atlanta, Mr. Beck served as a Legal Services attorney for indigents in Washington, D.C., produced a television program on the law for a Washington, D.C. television station, developed a mathematical model of the criminal justice system for the Urban Institute in Washington, and served in the U.S. Army, receiving the Meritorious Services Medal and two Army Commendation Medals.

He is a graduate of Emory College and Harvard law School and a recipient of the Emory Medal. He was named a "Power Advocate" at a ceremony in Washington by the organization "On Being A Black Lawyer" in recognition of his "strong support, as a non-black attorney, of diversity in the legal profession."

Mr. Beck has been recognized in The Best Lawyers in America^® every year since 1995, and in 2010 was named the Intellectual Property Lawyer of the Year by Intellectual Property Magazine at a ceremony in London.

When I began teaching in the Economics Department at Emory in the Fall of 1970, Emory was a "teaching" college that was so small then that it was possible in late August for there to be a meaningful "camp" where faculty members from all parts of the university gathered together in one location for meaningful general discussions. At that time the Economics Department was a part of the Business School while the Economics major was housed in the college. The university was on the quarter system; all of the College faculty taught 6 classes a year; and classes did not meet on Wednesday--Wonderful Wednesday. The classes I taught in my first years at Emory were consistently small, no more than 30 students. Moreover, faculty were expected to be excellent teachers first and researchers second. Of course, much has changed over the 49 years I have taught at Emory. Emory now is a world class research institution that produces excellently trained students both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels.

Most of my time at Emory I taught courses that emphasized the use of the mathematics used by economists--statistics, econometrics, economic forecasting, and mathematical economics. With the help of the faculty of the Mathematics Department, I created in the early 1970s the joint major Economics and Math. As a part of this major we created a capstone Mathematical Economics course. This class is unique in that it is jointly taught by an economist and a mathematician with both faculty members actively participating in all of the class sessions. This course was a joy for me to teach, in spite of the complaints from the students that it was too hard, because I learned more math from each of the mathematicians who jointly taught the course with me. The joint Economics and Math major grew in popularity from only a few majors to over 250 majors by the late-1990s. A large majority of students going on to graduate school in economics completed this joint major. All of the 6 winners of NSF Economics Graduate Fellowships from Emory were joint Economics and Math majors as undergraduates. The balance of my teaching effort was mainly devoted to the Economics Honors program--I managed the program and taught an Honors seminar almost continuously from 1975 until about 2011.

My research explored various theoretical and empirical issues in urban economics and in tort law. My most recent research examines the theoretical justification for the use of the comparative negligence standard in Common Law countries and offers an empirical explanation of the rapid adoption of the comparative negligence standard by the states after 1960.

As my main activity in retirement I have agreed to be a CASA volunteer--a court appointed special advocate for children participating in the DFACS system in northeast Georgia. The job of a CASA is to make sure that the wishes of children in the judicial system are clearly communicated to the court. Making sure that these wishes are known requires that the CASA meet regularly with the child assigned to them and with the parents, teachers, lawyers, and other adults important in the child's life. A typical case for a CASA lasts at least one year but may go on longer.

I am retiring after 21 years as a faculty member of the School of Public Health at Emory, thankful to have collaborated with wonderful colleagues and terrific students.  My primary appointment was in the Department of Environmental Health with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology. The focus of my research was in estimating effects of air pollution on health outcomes.  Our Emory research team often collaborated with scientists from Georgia Tech addressing questions such as whether short-term increases in air pollution levels lead to an increase in the number of daily emergency department visits for cardio-respiratory conditions in urban areas.  I also taught a spring and fall semester epidemiological methods sequence of courses for the Master of Science in Clinical Research (MSCR) degree program for each of the past 21 years, from the inception of the degree program at Emory.  The MSCR program is primarily designed for physicians who are seeking careers in academic medicine. Additionally, for the past 11 years I taught an epidemiologic statistics class designed for doctoral students in the Department of Epidemiology. I am extremely grateful for the opportunities that I have had and for the people that I have worked with during my time at Emory.  

I joined the faculty at Emory in January, 1980, when, as a graduate student at Harvard University, I was hired by the Candler School of Theology to teach Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. I hadn't planned to be on the job market, since I had a dissertation year fellowship, but my advisor said that the job at Emory was too good not to try for. So I hastily put my application materials together. This was the only job interview I ever did. And, since I was offered the position and accepted it, my appointment at Emory is the only job I've ever had. At that time Emory had been in the news because of the extraordinary gift from the Robert Woodruff Foundation of $100 million. This was early in Jim Laney's tenure as president, and there was a sense that Emory was a university poised to make its mark in the academic world. It was, truly, an exciting time to join the faculty, and I've enjoyed being a part of Emory's continuing path toward leadership in so many areas of academic and civic endeavor.

My own research has primarily been in the area of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was fortunate to be a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s, where two of the original team members for the publication of the scrolls were on the faculty. My advisor decided that he would not be able to complete the work of editing all of the scrolls assigned to him, and so he asked me to prepare an edition of one of the more significant scrolls for my dissertation. It was a cycle of thirteen mystical songs that was composed by the Jewish sectarian community at Qumran to cultivate a sense of engaging in common worship with the angels in the heavenly temple. Although I've written on other topics during my career, including the book of Job and early Jewish apocalyptic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls remain at the heart of my academic life. The project I'll be working on in retirement is a major commentary on the cycle of Thanksgiving Psalms (the Hodayot) from Qumran, which is an extraordinary set of first person singular prayer texts that simultaneously embody a radically negative anthropology quite at odds with later Rabbinic Judaism (humans are maggots!) and a sense that the members of the Qumran community alone have been elected for a  transformation that will make them fit to join the angels in a heavenly choir of praise. Heady stuff! And great fun to work on.

In Memoriam

Samarendranath Mitra died July 19, 2019.  He was born March 1, 1933, and earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1961.  He specialized in methods and demography, worked with many students, and retired from Emory in 1996, after 33 years on the faculty.  Samar was one of the Circle of Founding Members of EUEC and was a faithful member until his death.  A service was held at the Byrd & Flanagan Funeral Service in Lawrenceville, GA.  He is survived by his spouse, Rekha Mitra.