After graduating from Yale Law School in 1963, Ely served as the youngest staff lawyer on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ’40.

He then clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren and later worked as a criminal defense lawyer in San Diego.

Ely taught at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, and in 1975 spent a year serving as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation, but the University of Miami captured his heart.

While on a scuba diving trip in the Florida Keys, Ely visited the University of Miami and found the faculty and atmosphere to be “intellectually alive,” according to the dean of Miami’s School of Law, Dennis O. Lynch.

Ely left Stanford for the other sunshine state in 1996. He was on the faculty at Miami when he died.

Lynch, who attended Ely’s funeral yesterday at Coral Gables Congregational Church, remembered the impact that Ely had on the university.

“He generally encouraged and cultivated the intellectual life of the school,” Lynch said.

As a colleague, Lynch said Ely was very generous with his insights into administrative duties.

“He was very helpful to me because of his former experience as dean of Stanford Law School,” Lynch said. “He always gave me wise counsel whenever I asked for it.”

Lynch said that the university did not have any immediate plans on replacing Ely, who held the most distinguished chair at the law school, but he said that the university would look to other universities during their search for a new professor.

Ely is survived by his wife of one year, Gisela Cardonne Ely; his two sons, Robert and John; and two grandchildren.