But Zobel was not content to just sit on the sidelines and report on games. He played freshman soccer and intramural football, soccer, hockey and baseball for Leverett House as an upperclassman.

“What you should know about Hiller Zobel is that he is one of the state’s leading experts in baseball trivia,” Former State Appeals Court Judge Rudolph Kass, who worked with Zobel on The Crimson as the managing editor, told the Boston Globe. “He used to keep in his lobby, no matter where he went, a picture of Babe Ruth.”

Zobel toyed with the idea of going into journalism as an undergraduate, working as the Harvard sports correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and spending one summer as a copyboy for the San Francisco Chronicle.

But Zobel knew from his experience in American Government that he wanted to go into the law and was accepted to Harvard Law School (HLS) after graduating from the College in 1953.

Before he arrived at the Law School, however, Zobel spent two years stationed in Hawaii and then on the USS Los Angeles as an officer in the Navy, following many of his classmates into military service during the Korean War.

It was at Oxford University after the Navy that Zobel discovered a passion for analyzing English legal and constitutional history that would stay with him even as he delved into practicing law.

In his third year at HLS, Zobel landed a position to work as a legal intern for his professor, Pulitzer-Prize winner Mark DeWolfe Howe. Together they studied the manuscripts written by the family of President John Adams as part of a project founded in 1954 by the Massachusetts Historical Society called the Adams Papers.

Even after Zobel’s internship ended and he began building a law career, he continued to put together a book on the legal papers of John Adams with fellow HLS student L. Kinvin Wroth, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1965.

“He was an exhaustive researcher, meticulous in his citation and quotation of sources and his editing of documents,” Wroth says. “[He was] a careful prose stylist, and one who saw and clearly described the broader legal and historical significance of the often narrow and technical material with which we worked.”

In 1970, Zobel wrote another book, The Boston Massacre, making him the definitive expert on the 1770 incident when British troops fired on a mob of American colonists.

Zobel credits his experience on The Crimson and study of the Adams Papers with fueling his lifelong, intertwined interests in the law and writing.

Aside from his more academic writings, he was a vocal presence in the Boston legal community as a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor for six years, commentating on legal procedures from his vantage point as a judge.

Zobel practiced at the Boston-based firms of Bingham, Dana & Gould and Hill & Barlow for eight years, primarily handling cases that dealt with admiralty or maritime law. In addition, Zobel took a professorship with Boston College Law School for nearly 12 years until 1979 when he was appointed to the Massachusetts Superior Court as an associate justice.

As a judge, Zobel acquired a reputation for being arrogant but never unfair.

“Zobel could be a cantankerous fellow, and he often was,” says Silverglate, “But I have great respect for him, even if he sometimes was impossible and frustrating to deal with.”