“Not to compete, to succeed, or to fulfill requirements, but to understand, and to make a difference.” Steiker ’82, who taught Raskin in “Criminal Law,” wrote in an email. “Tommy embodied the joy of learning for its own sake,” Law School Professor Carol S. Raskin was also known for his “extreme” love for the word game Big Boggle and would often invite his classmates to play with him, Casper said.įaculty whom Raskin worked with said his commitment to justice and the law was evident in his classroom interactions. “Tommy sat up straighter with a sly little smile and made some joke about how I guess we were dropping the pleasantries.”įrom then on, “Tommy was Tommy in that class,” and everybody else remained “Mr. “The whole class burst into laughter,” Casper said. Raskin,” which Casper said had never happened before in the course. During a back and forth with the professor, the professor suddenly referred to Raskin as “Tommy” instead of “Mr. Casper, a second year law student and friend of Raskin’s, recalled one particular cold call during a class on tort law, in which students were notoriously addressed with honorifics. “He never proselytized or preached, he would just hold quietly firm in his own dedication to justice in a way that made everyone else want to stand by his side.”Ī young Tommy Raskin. “Tommy not only always had a great answer, but said it in a very distinctly Tommy way that always made us laugh and brought a little bit of levity - much needed levity - to the classroom,” Fairbank said. Raskin’s sense of humor shined through when professors called on him out of the blue - a staple of law school classes. “Law school can be intimidating and stressful and confusing, especially in the first year, and Tommy just had a way of warming up whatever room he was in,” Fairbank said. She recalled Raskin had a special gift for putting people at ease in his presence, even amid the intensity of Law School classes.
Fairbank, a second year law student, said she first met Raskin in her 1L Section, a collection of approximately 75 students that take classes together in their first year of law school. ‘A Buoyant Love of Teaching and Learning’ “It’s obvious that there are lots and lots of hearts that were broken in section two at Harvard Law School - he made wonderful friends there and these people will be a part of our extended family for the rest of our lives,” he said. Jamie Raskin said he and his family appreciate the support that Harvard - particularly his son’s Law School friends - has shown following his son’s death. In addition to serving as a teaching fellow in General Education 1171: “Justice: Ethics in an Age of Pandemic and Racial Reckoning” this fall, Raskin was a board member of Effective Altruism and a member of the Harvard Animal Law Society.
Raskin graduated from Amherst College in 2017, where he majored in History, helped lead the Amherst Political Union, won the Kellogg Prize, and wrote “a compelling senior thesis on the intellectual history of the animal rights movement,” his parents wrote in the tribute. Raskin, both Harvard Law School graduates, penned a moving tribute to their son earlier this month, remembering a young man with “a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously courageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind.” “But oftentimes these reflections and deliberations stay academic - Tommy always wanted to make sure he was translating the beliefs he arrived at into practice.” Jamin Ben “Jamie” Raskin ’83 (D-Md.), said in an interview with The Crimson. “College is a time when people do think about moral philosophy and morality, and that’s wonderful,” his father, U.S. Relentlessly passionate about aiding the global poor, Raskin’s friends and family said they will remember him as a visionary who displayed an intense commitment to justice and the truth, yet had an easy way of talking with people that made them feel heard and respected.ĭemby’s perception of Raskin’s passion to make the world a better place was shared by his family and friends. The cause of death was suicide after a long battle with depression, according to a family spokesperson. Raskin, a second year student at Harvard Law School, died Dec. For that reason, when she learned a few weeks later that Raskin had donated to the anti-poverty organization Oxfam in the names of each of his students, she was not necessarily surprised, but simply “impressed and taken aback by how authentic he was as a person.” What set Raskin apart, though, was that he did not just talk about creating a more just world, he lived his life in pursuit of that goal, Demby said. “Tommy” Raskin - asking, “Shouldn’t we all be doing as much as we can to help those less fortunate than us?”
Demby ’22 remembers her teaching fellow - Thomas B. During a section discussion in the famed Harvard course “Justice” this fall, Suuba M.
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