Search Results

This chapter highlights major themes of the previous chapters up to the current day. It explores the work of Hanna Gray in rebuilding university finances and fundraising in the 1980s and in sustaining the intellectual luster of the faculty. It also chronicles the very controversial reforms initiated by Hugo Sonnenschein to expand the College, a process that university leaders then accelerated after 2000, making the College today the largest single unit of the University of Chicago. The chapter explores the history of the Law School and Business School as examples of the emergence of a special kind of interdisciplinary professional research culture in the professional schools at Chicago that came to characterize Chicago after the 1950s. The chapter also explores the next stages of Chicago’s relationship with its neighbourhood and the city more broadly, using the history of the Charter School project and the Urban Education Institute as examples of new forms of university-civic engagement. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on the contemporary value culture of the University, as exemplified in two major interventions of the 1950s and 1960s—the Kalven Report and the Redfield-Singer civilizations project.

Chapter 7 recounts how Dean Joseph M. McLaughlin accelerated and improved upon the Law School’s modernization initiated by Dean Mulligan. He began the transformation of the Law School into the mainstream of legal education by adopting a more academic orientation of the Law School’s mission and program and adopting many pedagogical reforms and administrative reforms. For example, Dean McLaughlin and separating the Law School’s funding raising from that of Fordham University. The university retarded the Law School’s development by diverting its revenues to subsidize the university’s other divisions. This led to a conflict in 1973 between Fordham University and the ABA and AALS over the university’s financial relationship to the Law School that continued to 1987.

This chapter discusses the history of the Yale Law School across the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It first explores the text-and-recitation system, which was the School's main method of instruction. It then focuses on the two episodes of near collapse in 1845 and again in 1869, when Yale considered washing its hands of this seedy little trade school, which the University had effectively franchised to operate under the Yale name. It concludes with a look at the years immediately following the 1869 rescue, when a remarkable change in the University's attitude toward the Law School took place. Yale ceased distancing itself from the School and began instead to bolster it, encouraging the Law School to develop an ethos that it has manifested ever since.

Chapter 2 discusses the impact of World War I and its aftermath on the students and educational program at Fordham Law School and other law schools in New York City. It presents empirical evidence of the religious and ethnic composition of the student body from the 1920s to the 1940s, and it explains the role the Law School played in providing a legal education and the opportunity to achieve middle class respectability to Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their children as well as to women and black Americans, though the latter groups were underrepresented until the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Law School’s third dean, Francis P. Garvan, was concurrently an official in President Woodrow Wilson’s administration who planned and executed the Palmer Raids and the deportation of radical aliens in 1920.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s law school training and early career as an attorney in New York City. As a black woman, Kennedy did not fit neatly within a legal system in which the most visible architects of the courts’ civil and criminal process, doctrines, and unspoken codes were white men. With very little guidance on how to survive in a profession unaccustomed to black women in any role other than defendants, she had to make her own way. Now in her thirties, Kennedy created her own roadmap for becoming a lawyer, surviving as a working attorney, and gaining financial stability. Among her notable achievements was her contribution to intellectual property law, as she defended the rights of writers and jazz musicians (e.g., Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker) against the record labels that exploited their talents and profited from their creativity.

This book emerged from a lecture series on the history of the Yale Law School, sponsored by the school in the spring of 2001 as part of Yale University's tercentennial celebrations. A small group of historians were invited to address an aspect of the Law School's history of particular interest to him or her, giving some attention to chronological coverage. The goal was to illuminate a few specific episodes in the history of the Yale Law School in a manner that would sharpen our curiosity about the rest and remind us of how little we really know about the school's career and the evolution of its modern personality. The six provocative chapter gathered in this volume may serve as a tantalizing prelude to the comprehensive history of the Yale Law School that remains to be constructed.

This chapter describes how “the Langdell system of study had not been adopted in any other law school.” Then, during the late 1880s, Harvard Law School (HLS) began surpassing even the most optimistic hopes of raising academic standards, attracting growing numbers of well-qualified students and producing well-trained graduates desired by leading firms. By 1895, when Langdell retired as dean, his system had triumphed, as ambitious, serious students crowded into HLS and as law schools at other universities began to adopt the model. Simultaneously, however, the leading meritocrats betrayed the HLS system by violating their own academic standards. Despite its universalist principle, the practice of educational formalism was “gravely unjust,” because the meritocrats explicitly categorized certain people apart from the rest of the applicants and then treated those categories invidiously as a matter of policy.

This chapter focuses on the time H. L. A. Hart's spent in Harvard University. In early September 1956, Herbert set out from Southampton on the Queen Elizabeth, bound for New York. He was heading for the pinnacle of the American University system, Harvard, where he had been invited to spend a year visiting both the Law School and the Philosophy Department. Harvard Law School — indeed Harvard University — presented him with an intellectual environment strikingly different from Oxford, and one which he could not reasonably have expected to be particularly welcoming.

This chapter provides insights into the state of racial inequality in the US today, with a particular eye on income, wealth, jobs, and education disparities. Do these factors continue to be predicted by race? If they do not, then there really is no need to consider race when making policy at the national and state levels or in higher education. The discussions over affirmative action and how it should be implemented would be moot. This chapter also provides an examination of the impact of education in general and in particular for minorities. We look at how the elimination of affirmative action at the state level has affected enrollment of minorities in higher education. We then provide a look at the history of affirmative action related to higher education in the courts. As such, we offer a detailed synopsis of past court cases that have set the stage for how affirmative action is viewed and used in higher education today. In this light, we discuss the ever-present and surprisingly controversial notion of diversity and how it shapes the affirmative action landscape. We end the chapter by discussing our methodological and analytical strategies for the remaining portion of the book.

This chapter explores the sometimes rocky relationship between the Law School and Yale University during the middle years of the twentieth century. The relationship was troubled by continuing anxieties about the place of professional education in a university devoted to pure research, and by worries that the association of certain faculty with left-liberal causes might jeopardize the reputation—and support—of the University among its more conservative graduates.

This chapter focuses on the education and careers of Marcus Simaika's siblings. According to Marcus, no fewer than three prime ministers were among the graduates of the Coptic Patriarchal School: Boutros Pasha Ghali and Youssef Pasha Wahba, both Copts, and Yehia Pasha Ibrahim, a Muslim. A large number of ministers, heads of administrations, judges, and statesmen also graduated from this school. Marcus's two elder brothers, Abd al-Messih and Rizqallah, both graduated at the top of their class and were sent to the School of Law. They were later transferred to the Mixed Courts and then to the newly established Native Courts. Abdallah, the younger brother of Marcus, went to Montpellier to study law, while his youngest brother Attallah entered the Egyptian State Railways. His sister married her first cousin, Wassef Pasha Simaika.

This chapter recounts Julius Chambers's achievements during college, graduate school, and law school. After graduating summa cum laude from North Carolina College for Negroes and obtaining his masters degree in history at the University of Michigan, Chambers was admitted to the University of North Carolina School of Law, desegregated the prior decade by federal court order over the forceful objections of University and North Carolina officials. Chambers, despite being ranked 112th among the 114 students admitted to the Class of 1962 and notwithstanding a generally unwelcoming, often hostile atmosphere at the Law School and on campus, became editor-in-chief of the Law Review and graduated first in his class. This chapter also details Chambers's marriage to Vivian Giles and the couple's decision to move to New York City when, after no North Carolina law firm would grant Chambers a job interview, Columbia Law School quickly stepped forward with the offer of a one-year fellowship.

This chapter discusses the legal battles involving the University of Texas School of Law and its affirmative action program. In the wake of its success in 1944 in the all-white primary case, Smith v. Allwright, the Texas NAACP called for the integration of Texas's flagship university in Austin. Some months later Thurgood Marshall wrote a letter to Austin's only African American lawyer asking for information about how to apply to the UT School of Law. The chapter examines the Supreme Court case of Heman Marion Sweatt that produced a major stepping-stone toward Brown v. Board of Education, along with another case involving UT's undergraduate admissions that reaffirmed a state's right to implement affirmative action policies. In particular, it analyzes McLaurin v. Regents and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, along with the Texas legislature's response to Hopwood v. Texas in the form of the “10% rule.”

This chapter focuses on the decline of the Glasgow Law School during the period 1801–1830. When John Millar died in 1801, he was succeeded by Robert Davidson, who lacked his predecessor's broad, philosophical approach. While, with Millar, the masters at the University of Glasgow had been keen to use the patronage system to gain an active and successful professor who would attract students and promote the values of Enlightened education, Davidson was appointed because he was the principal's son. He failed to maintain viable classes in Civil Law, and appears to have ceased to teach it after 1819. He did have students for Scots law, seemingly in reasonable numbers. The chapter considers how legal education in Glasgow changed, away from the values of Adam Smith and Millar, and towards a supposedly ‘practical’ rather than theoretical focus, during Davidson's tenure.

This chapter focuses on Langdell's youth, where lie the origins of his interest in education and the specific reforms in professional education that he advanced as dean of Harvard Law School. Langdell's encounters with John Locke's Education at Phillips Exeter Academy, with taxonomy and specimens in the natural history classes of Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz, with “office” education in a law firm, with the degree requirements at Harvard Divinity School, with other law students in table talk, and with eleemosynary aid for needy students contributed to principles and policies that he later instituted in professional education. Above all, Langdell's firm commitment to a formal system of academic merit originated in the experience of practicing self-discipline, following the established rules, and achieving academically. By this route, Langdell gradually elevated himself from an impoverished and traumatic childhood to the threshold of the elite in the legal profession.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s battle to challenge discrimination once she arrived in New York City during World War II. During her first decade in the city, she was an undergraduate at Columbia University and then a law student in Columbia’s Law School. In this stimulating and diverse political and social milieu, she began to expand and sharpen her family’s “take no shit” position. The combination of her formal education and her individual protests outside the classroom encouraged her development as a black feminist. Already concerned with challenging both racism and patriarchal expectations about her freedom of movement and sexual expression, she began in her late twenties and early thirties to critique capitalism, make direct connections between racism and sexism, and confront these interlocking systems of oppression.