Barbara Aronstein Black, a legal historian who achieved a milestone as the first woman to lead an Ivy League law school, at Columbia University, died on Jan. 20 in Philadelphia. She was 92. As dean, Professor Black, a scholar of law in colonial America, influenced curricular reform, bolstered Columbia’s corporate law program, brought more women and people of color onto the faculty, adopted a maternal leave policy, and introduced a part-time program for mothers. After [...]

David Rosen, a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur who transformed his photo booth business in Japan into Sega enterprises, the video game giant that dominated arcades, basements and dorm rooms with blockbusters like Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, and N.H.L. ’94, died on Dec. 25 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96. During a four-decade career that began in the 1950s with coin-operated machines and culminated with the introduction of cutting-edge home gaming systems, Mr. Rosen [...]

Dorothy Vogel a librarian who, with her postal-clerk husband, Herbert, bought thousands of works from future art stars, stashing them in their cramped one-bedroom New Yor apartment and eventually handling over the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art, died on Nov. 10 in Manhattan. She was 90. Throughout their decades as collectors, Ms. Vogel worked at the Brooklyn Public Library as a reference librarian, and Mr. Vogel, a high school dropout from Harlem, [...]

British playwright Tom Stoppard, a towering figure in theater and film, died on Nov. 29, 2025, at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88. Born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, then part of Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family, he and his family fled Nazi persecution — first to Singapore, then to India, before finally settling in Britain in 1946. He attended school in Yorkshire, and at age 17 began working as [...]

Mel Leipzig, an acclaimed figurative painter whose passion for detail transformed depictions of fellow New Jerseyans in mundane settings into mesmerizing enigmas, died on Nov. 1 in Princeton, NJ. He was 90. The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1979 that Mr. Leipzig’s “sense of mysterious emotional tensions in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him, perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton, referring to the Russian dramatist who revealed the melancholy interior lives of his [...]

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and acclaimed American architects, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Santa Monica, CA. He was 96, and still working on an 82,000-square-foot flagship store for Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive, and finalizing a 1,000-seat concert hall for the Colburn School of Music in downtown Los Angeles. Gehry is best known for his work building the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997; the Walt Disney Concert [...]

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary for more than three decades and left an indelible mark on generations of rabbis and Jewish scholars, died on Dec. 11. He was 73. Beyond the numerous eulogies that have been written for him, the rabbi’s reflections on life and faith endure. “What draws me back to Hashem, if not to my life as a whole, is Psalm 23: ‘Though I walk through the valley [...]