Funeral Service Live Stream:
Events
The visitation will take place on Tuesday, March 19, 2024 starting 6:00PM – 8:00PM EDT at the Robert A. Pumphrey Funeral Home, Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Inc., located at 7557 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814.
The Mass Of Christian Burial will take place on Wednesday, March 20, 2024 starting 11:00AM – 12:00PM EDT at the St. Jane Frances de Chantal Catholic Church, located at 9601 Old Georgetown Rd, Bethesda, MD 20814. For those unable to attend the service in-person, you can participate remotely by viewing the live stream of the service (please scroll up to see the video).
The interment will take place at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, located at 13801 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20906.
Obituary
Faust Frank Rossi passed away peacefully on March 6, 2024, in Bethesda, Maryland. Faust was the Samuel S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Techniques, Emeritus at Cornell Law School where he taught for nearly half a century. He was a nationally recognized expert in evidence, trial advocacy, and civil procedure. He was also a devoted husband, excellent father, and loving grandfather.
The son of Italian immigrants, Guerino Rossi and Louise Miroglio Rossi, Faust was born in Rochester, New York on August 9, 1932. He attended The Aquinas Institute in Rochester and is a 1953 graduate of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. From 1953 to 1957, he was an officer in the United States Navy serving in Sasebo, Japan and Charleston, South Carolina. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 1960 and began his legal career as a trial attorney with the United States Department of Justice Honors Program in Washington, DC. While in Washington, Faust fell in love with Charline Newman. They would be married for 56 years until her death in 2018. Upon returning to Rochester, Faust was a litigator with his brother Anthony at the law firm of Rossi and Rossi.
In 1966, Faust joined the faculty of Cornell Law School where he taught Evidence, Civil Procedure, and Trial Advocacy. He was an enormously popular and energetic teacher. He brought the law to life for generations of students with memorable hypotheticals populated by purported denizens of his “old neighborhood,” Spano, Mrs. Garibaldi, Delvecchio, Madge, Yukel, and baby Grutz. He was a national winner of the Roscoe Pound Jacobson Award for Excellence in Teaching Trial Advocacy. It is estimated that Faust taught more students at Cornell Law School than any other professor in its 137-year history. He also served as the Associate Academic Dean. When he retired from Cornell Law School in 2013, The School honored Faust’s career by naming one of its annual moot court competitions The Faust F. Rossi Moot Court Competition.
Throughout his career, Faust authored and co-authored numerous books including Expert Witnesses, Evidence for the Trial Lawyer, and The New York Evidence Handbook. In 2016, Faust authored with Professor Glenn C. Altschuler, the acclaimed book Ten Great American Trials: Lessons in Advocacy. Faust gave hundreds of Continuing Legal Education lectures to lawyers and judges in the United States and Europe. He reached over a hundred thousand law students with his popular bar review lectures and nationally distributed “Law School Legends” audio and video series on Evidence. Faust was a recurring visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest and a regular faculty member in the joint Cornell/Paris 1 Summer Institute of International and Comparative Law. During his career he was a visiting law professor at Oxford University, the University of Siena, New York University, Emory University, University of San Diego, and Georgetown University. He also taught for many years at the annual National Institute for Trial Advocacy.
A former student who went on to become a United States District Court Judge described Faust’s contributions: “I want [you] to understand how many there are like me . . . How many of us [were impacted] over the years, over the 47 years, over hundreds and thousands of Cornell students and students elsewhere who [Professor Rossi] touched, and how our lives were made better [because of him].”
Faust loved the law, Cornell, great Italian food, the St. Louis Cardinals, a good joke, mystery novels, and running. Most of all, Faust loved his family who will miss him profoundly. He is survived by his sons Christopher (Anna), Matthew (Maureen), and Paul (Sofiya); grandchildren Bridget, Owen, and Nora; many nieces and nephews; and cousins in Italy.