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Professor Emeritus Kenneth M. Stroud passed away on August 17, 2015, at the age of 80.  A professor at IU McKinney School of Law for 26 years, he taught several generations of alumni in the areas of criminal law, evidence and appellate practice.  

On the occasion of Stroud’s retirement from law school teaching in 1999, his colleague Professor James W. Torke (now also Emeritus), wrote a moving tribute to him.  The following is an excerpt from the tribute: "Ken Stroud is a consummate teacher. I have already reported the regard his students had for him. But beyond this, he is a teacher for all who will listen. Those of his colleagues and friends who read this tribute will understand what I mean when I say that he was my best teacher, that much of what I might have achieved as a teacher and scholar was built on lessons I learned from Ken Stroud. His art is made up of three parts: hard work and thorough preparation; intellectual rigor and honesty; and, perhaps his rarest gift, an ability to engage others in conversation as supple, clear, and lively as a spring stream. I have said that his teaching began with hard work and thorough preparation. I have known no other colleague who, right up to his retirement, put so much effort into preparation for each class. I experienced this ethic over the many summers in which other colleagues and I joined Ken in the study of legal philosophy. In those summers, I learned from him what it takes to gain a full and honest understanding of a text. The preparation, care, and discipline that he brought to this task became our prescription and rule. As a student and a thinker, he was adventurous but never satisfied with an easy understanding or superficial chatter. To every topic, he brought a broadly-informed mind that was without ostentation, an intellectual rigor free of rigidity, and a seriousness of purpose without self-importance. He always, in a favorite phrase of his, “stayed on the merits.” Old friends have often heard him invoke his “spiral theory” of thought. To my understanding, the spiral theory is a way of looking at the world with a lawyerly eye: as soon as you come to grasp an argument from one side, you must turn and attack it from the other, and so on in an ever-rising spiral of insight. Thought never comes to rest."

The full Tribute may be found on the Indiana Law Review web site.