Calvin Massey: Gentleman and Scholar

I first met Calvin Massey in person in 1994, when I joined the U.C. Hastings faculty. However, I knew of and admired Calvin’s scholarship long before that. Six years earlier, I was a law student at the University of Chicago, and a student editor at the law review. In that role, I helped cite-check and edit a major article authored by Calvin, as well as a series of short responses by Calvin and other scholars, debating the meaning and scope of the Eleventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I was struck then, and continue to be amazed, by the clarity, thoroughness, and intellectual rigor of this exchange, and especially Calvin’s contributions to it. I truly believe that these papers provide a model for what engaged, respectful, and careful scholarly debate should look like. They certainly provided an inspiration to me as I began my scholarly career, just as Calvin provided crucial mentorship during my early years at Hastings. In this brief essay I summarize this intellectual exchange, and explain why I think it epitomizes Calvin’s extraordinary strengths as a scholar, and as a gentleman

Ratios of periods for tensor product motives

In this article we prove some period relations for the ratio of Deligne's periods for certain tensor product motives. These period relations give a motivic interpretation for certain algebraicity results for ratios of successive critical values for Rankin-Selberg L-functions for ${\rm GL}_n \times {\rm GL}_{n'}$ proved by G\"unter Harder and the second author.Comment: In this revised version, we have made some minor modifications according to the comments by the refere