Cyril “Cy” A. Fox Jr., law professor for nearly four decades, died March 14, 2025, at 88.
Fox, said Larry Frolik, his colleague for 30 of those years, was “a real student-oriented professor, a real train-you-to-be-a-lawyer professor: ‘What are the arguments you should be making, and what are the issues, and how should you approach them?’ His view of a law professorship: We were training lawyers. His duty, obligation and desire were to make sure students in his class learned something that related to their practice as a lawyer.”
Half of Fox’s teaching load for much of his career, Frolik recalled, involved a first-year property law course — and one could hardly find a subject more common to the practice of law, Frolik explained. At the upper level, he taught a course on real-estate transactions.
Fox also taught a seminar in mineral law, covering coal mining and oil extraction. “That seminar was designed with the thought: ‘If you ever ended up doing work for coal companies, or suing coal companies, this is how the game works,’” Frolik said.
“He was a traditional, question-and-answer type of guy,” Frolik continued. “He engaged his students. He always thought that the teaching impact was the most important part of his job. Even in his writing, it was not just some theory — a lawyer could learn how to do his job better from something Cy wrote.”
Frolik recalled as well the literal open-door policy that Fox maintained for his students — with pipe smoke leaking into the hallway, back in the decades when smoking was allowed in offices. “Students would come in and they would chat it up and he would be puffing on his pipe. I can always see Cy, puffing on that pipe, which gives you time to think.”
“Cy was a selfless colleague who had a rare combination of attributes,” remembered another former colleague, Arthur D. Hellman. “He didn’t try to run things or tell everyone what to do, but he was always willing to take on the hard jobs that were necessary to make the law school run smoothly. In those days, not many faculty members volunteered to serve on the curriculum committee, perhaps because it meant taking on the job of putting the curriculum together. But Cy always put his name in, and year after year he chaired the committee effectively and efficiently.
“At faculty meetings,” Hellman said, “when disagreements arose, he always looked for a middle ground, and his ideas often made it possible for both sides to walk away thinking that the outcome was at least reasonable. That helped us to avoid the bitter polarization that occurred in some other law schools.”
Born on Feb. 18, 1937, Cyril Fox graduated from Peabody High School in 1954, the College of Wooster in 1958, and Pitt’s law school in 1965. He earned his school’s excellence in teaching award twice, as voted by the senior class, and helped to found the Eastern Mineral Law Foundation, which brought together legal scholars and industry professionals.
He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Jane; children Edwin, Cyril and Jen Fox; and four grandchildren.
— Marty Levine