Written by: Nic Arp

When retired Judge Jon Fister (67BS, 71JD) established the Jon and Sarah Fister Chair in Law and Economics in 2024, all he really wanted to do was to create something that would trigger memories of times and places that he and his wife, Sarah, enjoyed together before her death in 2023.

Make no mistake: Jon is happy that the chair, made possible by his $2 million gift to the Iowa Law School Foundation, will help his alma mater hire faculty in an area of law he finds exciting while also providing students with a strong understanding of law and economics.

But Jon also likes to imagine the chair as a virtual “arborglyph.” An arborglyph is a tree carving, and a young man’s carving his girl’s name or initials goes back at least to the Greek poet Callimachus and to Orlando in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Iowa City and Iowa Law

The first piece of the arborglyph’s design happened when Jon began his Iowa Law studies in the fall of 1968.

He found especially cheap housing—a cabin in the woods north of town between Linder Road and the Iowa River that had once been part of a lime kiln operation that produced quicklime for cementing brick and stone masonry in the 1800s. The same family had owned it since then, and Jon worked out a deal.

Hauling water and fuel oil was a challenge, and there were several weeks each winter when you could not get to the cabin or back to the road without tire chains. It turned out to be something of a poor man’s Walden Pond, without the pond. His mother worried that he didn’t have a telephone.

Jon earned his law degree in 1971 and joined Stephens & Millhone in Clarinda, Iowa. It was a great place to start, but Clarinda felt too small, and Page County was one of only two counties in Iowa without a state liquor store. So, when a classmate called in 1972 about a job opening at the Beecher Law Firm in Waterloo, Iowa, he jumped at the chance and spent the next 21 years practicing commercial, banking, and real estate law in Waterloo and northeast Iowa.

Jon left private practice in 1993, when Gov. Terry Branstad appointed him a district court judge for Iowa’s First Judicial District, and, in 2008, he became chief judge of the district. Iowa Law had helped him build an impressive legal career, which, looking back, he finds both surprising and amusing.

“I was an unaccomplished student, an average lawyer, and a mediocre judge,” he said. “But I was lucky and had good timing.”

A big year for the Hawkeyes—and for Jon and Sarah

This is when the “butterfly effect”—and second design element of the Fister arborglyph—entered the picture. One evening in the spring of 1980, Jon had just finished a presentation to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Board of Realtors at a convention hotel and nightspot when a couple of girls about two tables off the dance floor caught his eye. One of them was Sarah. It was the beginning of a grand adventure and an elegant example of the butterfly effect in that, just as the air displaced by a butterfly in Argentina can be said to have caused a tornado in West Texas, the College of Law can be said to have brought Jon to where he met Sarah.

Sarah had been an Iowa City girl, and in her first year at the UI, she was a member of the famed Scottish Highlanders, a group that performed at Hawkeye football games, and was voted one of five “Freshman Beauties.” Her older brother, Jim, played Iowa football.

In the fall of 1980, Sarah was ready for football season. She and Jon saw Nebraska roll over Iowa 57-0 and finish 4-7, so it was a big deal in 1981 when Jon—on a trip to campus for a CLE course—scored tickets to the rematch through the law school. They watched the unranked Hawkeyes upset seventh-ranked Nebraska 10-7 and, two weeks later, upset sixth-ranked UCLA 20-7. It was Hayden Fry’s third season, Iowa’s first winning season in 19 years, and its first Rose Bowl appearance since 1959. Sarah thought that she and Jon must have brought good luck to the Hawkeyes, and he assured her it was true.

Tax season followed football season and, by income averaging and amending her last three returns, Jon found Sarah a hefty refund. Between the tax windfall and a few other things, she began to sense that he was not merely handsome and dashing but also wise and clever. They married in July 1983.

A passion for law and economics

The final piece of the “virtual carving” was etched on a trip to Colorado. In 1998, Henry Butler, now the director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University, was at Kansas University and was the director of the Institute of Law & Organizational Economics for State Court Judges. The Institute was held annually in two sessions, and Jon and Sarah traveled to Copper Mountain, Colorado, for the second.

In late summer, Copper Mountain was carpeted in blue and orange wildflowers. You could take the ski lift to the mountaintop and hike trails down through the wildflowers. There were pop-up thundershowers in the afternoon causing you to take shelter under the pine trees. On the way home, Jon and Sarah stopped in the Black Hills and enjoyed several days on Spearfish Creek. It was an experience you didn’t want to forget.

The Institute’s faculty included professors in law, economics, environmental policy, and psychology. Henry Manne, one of the founders of the law and economics discipline, made a surprise appearance and gave a special lecture. The other subjects presented included everything from the gray wolves at Yellowstone Park to the butterfly effect.

The application of economic analysis to jurisprudence gave Jon more ways of thinking about legal issues, influenced him for the rest of his career, and suggested itself as an obvious choice for an endowed chair at the law school.

Establishing the Fister chair

At the end of The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart’s character says, “When something happens to your partner, you’re supposed to do something about it.”

Doing something about Sarah’s death started with creating a playlist of their favorite songs that brought to mind times and places worth remembering. He expected it might run to 40 or 50 songs, but pruned it back from nearly 150 to just over 80.

Then the Jon and Sarah Fister Chair in Law and Economics came to him, which seemed like another way to bring his and Sarah’s names together, much as an arborglyph would.

Jon understands how simple actions today can have profound and unpredictable effects in the future.

“What happens next depends on what has gone before,” Jon said, “and we won’t know what that is until it happens.”

One thing is certain: The Fister Chair will endure, impacting lives, careers, and the study and practice of law.