Administration. — When Henry Moore Bates retired in 1939, E. Blythe Stason was appointed Dean of the Law School. At that time, the Dean handled Law School administration with the assistance of the Secretary of the faculty and a Recorder. In the years following World War II, however, a growing faculty and student body required additional administrators. In 1956, because of the proliferation of administrative obligations, there was a reorganization of the administrative offices of the Law School. An assistant dean assumed the duties previously carried out by the secretary of the faculty, and an associate dean assumed responsibility for research in legal education and for alumni relations and advisory functions in the recruitment of faculty and the planning of the budget.
From October 22 through 24, 1959, the Law School celebrated its hundredth anniversary. The Centennial Celebration brought more than five hundred alumni to the Law School for a program entitled "Frontiers in Law and Legal Education." Twelve honorary degrees were conferred, and the alumni presented the Law School with a substantial cash gift. Also, in its hundredth year, the Law School published Legal Education at Michigan: 1859-1959, a history by Elizabeth Gaspar Brown.
The first year of the second century of the Law School saw the retirement of Dean Stason, whose twenty-one year deanship ended in 1960. Allan Smith succeeded him. Dean Smith became the Vice-President for Academic Affairs of the University in 1965. Charles W. Joiner served as Acting Dean until Francis Allen assumed the deanship in 1966. In 1971, Dean Allen resigned the deanship to return to teaching and research. Theodore St. Antoine succeeded him. The years between 1966 and 1971 had seen national student unrest, which significantly affected the Law School deanship. The rate of change and the physical and emotional demands on an administrator during those years led to a limited term deanship held by a younger man. Taking office at the age of forty-two, Dean St. Antoine was the first Dean of the Law School to serve under a five-year renewable term appointment.
Faculty. — In 1939, the Law Faculty consisted of fifteen professors, two associate professors, one assistant professor, one visiting professor, and two part-time outside lecturers. By 1972-73, it included forty-three professors, six associate professors, four assistant professors, four visiting professors, six instructors, and five part-time lecturers. The size of the faculty fosters diversification. Increasingly after 1960, the faculty has included scholars in other disciplines. In 1972-73, two professors of psychiatry, a professor of psychology and sociology, and two professors of economics taught regularly in the Law School; two of these held tenured appointments on the law faculty. In addition, the faculty included lawyers who had, or were in the process of acquiring, full credentials in history, sociology, philosophy, and foreign languages.
Faculty members have made numerous contributions to state and national bar associations and to other professional and scholarly organizations. They have been appointed and elected to municipal, state, and federal offices, including a mayoralty, the chairmanships and executive directorships of important state and federal commissions, and two Assistant Attorney Generalships of the United States. They frequently testify before legislative bodies and render technical assistance in drafting municipal ordinances and state and federal statutes. In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, nine major law schools turned to the Michigan faculty for their new deans.
Curriculum and Pedagogy. — In 1972-73, the Law School offered over one hundred courses and seminars, more than twice as many as it had offered in 1940-41. Traditional courses like property, torts, contracts, evidence, civil procedure, business associations, trusts and estates, and constitutional law remain an important part of the curriculum. But man's changing attitudes toward his society, toward the function of law, and toward legal education have resulted in new offerings in new fields. As government increasingly affected its citizens' lives, public law assumed significance in the curriculum through new, or greater numbers of, offerings in such fields as administrative law, taxation, legislation, antitrust law, labor law, regulated industries, and public policy. Statutory developments affected offerings in public law and many other fields, such as commercial law, civil procedure, and business law. New social concerns suggested legal approaches to, and offerings in, areas like atomic energy, race relations, consumer protection, and natural resources. Although basic courses in international and comparative law had been offered prior to World War II, the heightened interest in international affairs following the War resulted in offerings in subjects like Communist law, African law, Common Market law, and the law applicable to American businesses operating overseas.
Increasing numbers of offerings have dealt with the relationship of law and other fields of knowledge, such as philosophy, sociology, medicine, business, and accounting. At the same time, the law student has been given a greater opportunity to investigate his own profession and the legal system through courses or seminars in legal history, legal philosophy, professional responsibility, and legal education.
About one-third of the offerings in 1972-73 were seminars. Although seminars had been offered as early as 1925, their numbers increased markedly after World War II. The seminar provides a unique opportunity for a teacher to explore, and his students to study, a specialized field of interest. Small group instruction allows teachers to explore new teaching techniques and materials and enables students to engage in closely supervised research and writing.
Since the nineteenth century, the Law School has trained students in research techniques and legal writing through courses requiring the drafting of legal documents, courses in trial practice, moot courts, and Case Clubs. The Case Club program offers another method by which students can learn research and writing skills. In 1940, the Case Clubs were an important although voluntary part of the Law School education. By 1964, 370 of 395 first-year students participated in the Clubs.
Although the Case Clubs and many courses and seminars involved solving problems arising from hypothetical situations, the curriculum afforded no opportunity for students to help handle actual cases until 1969. In the summer of that year, the Law School offered its first clinical course, in which ten students, under the supervision of a faculty member, handled cases from the Washtenaw Legal Aid Clinic and attended a weekly seminar. This course, as subsequently expanded, provides thirty students a term the chance to interview clients, to appear in court, to prepare legal arguments, and to experience the practical problems a lawyer must face. In 1972-73, clinical opportunities also included a semester's residence at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C.; a State Department Internship, under which students served in the Department's Office of the Legal Advisor in Washington; and a course entitled Criminal Appellate Practice.
Technological developments have also affected legal education. They have stimulated courses in the legal problems raised by atomic energy, broadcasting, and computers. Films are used in classes as teaching aids. A closed-circuit television system, completed in 1962, allows students to observe a local court by means of a viewer in Hutchins Hall. Video equipment is available to faculty and students and a computer terminal at the Law School aids numerous research projects.
Lectures and special programs supplement regular curricular offerings. In 1946 the Law Faculty established the Thomas M. Cooley Lectureship, devoted to the presentation of scholarly discussions of timely professional topics. Inaugurated in 1944-45 and open to all members of the University, the William W. Cook Lectures on American Institutions are of special interest to law students.
In 1967, the Juris Doctor degree, which previously had been awarded only to those candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Laws who had demonstrated superior scholarship, became the only undergraduate degree offered by the Law School. Since 1967, the Juris Doctor has been awarded cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude to students who have achieved academic excellence.
In 1957, the Law School added the degree Master of Comparative Law to the other graduate degrees of Master of Laws and Doctor of the Science of Law. A gradual decrease in emphasis on graduate work as a prerequisite for teaching law resulted in fewer domestic graduate students by the 1970s. But at the same time, increased financial assistance was made available to the most promising graduate degree candidates, especially to young law teachers who desired to improve their qualifications through further study and research. In addition, growing numbers of foreign graduate students attended the Law School after World War II. In 1972-73, the graduate program brought eight foreign research scholars and nineteen foreign graduate students to the School.
The Law School has always believed that it has a responsibility for the continuing education of lawyers and the maintenance of its own contacts with the realities of professional life. Between 1939 and 1959, the School offered a number of institutes and special summer sessions for practicing lawyers who wanted to review legal developments or study a particular legal problem. In 1950, the School presented the first of a series of Annual Advocacy Institutes to give attorneys an opportunity to further their skills as trial lawyers.
In 1960 the Law School joined with the Wayne State University Law School and the State Bar of Michigan to establish the Institute of Continuing Legal Education, in order to expand the types of postgraduate programs for practicing lawyers. The Institute each year publishes approximately forty books and sets of legal material and presents approximately thirty programs, including the Annual Advocacy Institute.
Research. — The Cook gifts, and gifts and grants from numerous alumni, foundations, legal organizations, state and federal governments, and other sources, have enabled legal research to flourish at the Law School. Treatises and monographs written at the Law School have contributed significantly to the growth of legal doctrine. Faculty members have prepared casebooks and other teaching materials, which are used at many law schools. In the 1950s, traditional modes of legal research were modified to include interdisciplinary efforts to analyze legal problems raised by socioeconomic phenomena situations, such as the development of atomic energy or the Common Market. Computers have aided the development of sophisticated, empirical approaches to society's institutions. New areas of the law have been explored.
Dean Stason's conviction that statutory law was becoming an integral part of legal institutions led to the organization, in 1950, of the Legislative Research Center to promote teaching, research, and service in the area of legislation. The Center has helped the Michigan legislature implement a new constitution, has published studies of fields of state legislation, has drafted several acts submitted to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, and has prepared memoranda on various phases of statutory law for members of the Law Faculty.
Although the Law School had teaching and research in international and comparative law since the close of World War I, a series of Ford Foundation grants beginning in 1954 recognized the School's achievements in these areas and enabled its activities to continue at an accelerated pace. Funds from the Ford Foundation and other sources have provided for research, foreign graduate student fellowships, an addition to the Law Faculty, and travel and administrative assistance. By 1972, more than one-third of the faculty working regularly in domestic law had been engaged in some international or comparative legal research. Increased faculty involvement has led to more courses and seminars and greater student interest in these fields. Foreign scholars have taught and studied at the School, and exchange programs have been arranged between the Law School and foreign universities. With the help of the Law School, Professor Hessel Yntema founded the American Journal of Comparative Law in 1951 and served as its Editor-in-Chief until 1966. For more than a decade, Professor William Bishop, Jr., served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law.
Extensive faculty research and writing contributes to legal knowledge and enables students to study under and to work with persons who are developing new ideas and new approaches to the law. In 1971-72, the Law faculty published over one hundred and twenty books and articles. Since 1939, major works resulting from research at the Law School and published by the Law School have included, for example, The Conflict of Laws: A Comparative Study, by Ernst Rabel (4 vols., 1945-58 and 2 ed. rev., 1958 — ), Atoms and the Law, by E. Blythe Stason, Samuel D. Estep, and William Pierce (1959); American Enterprise in the European Common Market, edited by Eric Stein and Thomas Nicholson (1960); Automobile Accident Costs and Payments: A Study of the Economics of Injury Reparation, by Alfred F. Conard and others (1964); Civil Code of The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic: An English Translation by Whitmore Gray and Raymond Stults (1965); Comparative Conflict Resolution Procedures in Taxation, by L. Hart Wright et al. (1968); and The Law of Negotiable Instruments (Bills of Exchange) in the Americas, by Hessel E. Yntema and Rodolfo Batiza (1969).
Students edit two periodicals, which present the product of student and faculty research. Under student editors-in-chief since 1940, the Michigan Law Review has made a gradual transition from faculty to student operation and control. In April 1968, students began publication of a new journal, Prospectus: A Journal of Law Reform. Seeking to suggest ways and report efforts to improve and administer the law, this journal publishes articles by students, faculty, and outside contributors and encourages flexible and experimental approaches to legal problems.
Law Library. — The Law Library, one of the largest in the country, is a major source of legal material for the entire central portion of the United States. The collection includes published court reports, constitutions, codes, and statutes of the United States and of many foreign countries. The Law Library houses treatises on all phases of law and legal science and extensive, and often rare, collections in fields as diverse as Roman law, criminology, legal bibliography, and economics. It contains nearly complete files of the leading legal periodicals published throughout the world.
The collection has grown from 145,261 bound volumes in 1940 to 423,682 in 1972. This growth has necessitated the addition to the Legal Research Building of four floors of stacks in 1955, the establishment in Hutchins Hall of a satellite library of 15,000 basic volumes in 1972, and the construction in the basement of Hutchins Hall of a special room for rare books in 1973.
A member of the faculty who serves as Director administers the library as a part of the School. Hobart Coffey directed the Law Library from 1926 until 1965, when Beverley J. Pooley succeeded him.
Students. — The Law School regular session enrollment was 641 in 1940-41, although World War II lowered that number to 108 in 1943-44. From 1942 through 1946, the Judge Advocate General's School used the Law Quadrangle to train 2,684 officers and officer candidates. In 1947-48, the regular session enrollment hit a postwar peak of 1,107 but declined to 706 by 1953-54. With minor fluctuations, regular session enrollment increased through 1971-72, when it reached a record high of 1,245. Although the Law School, beginning in 1868, had prepared numerous Black students for careers in law, the increasing number of highly qualified applicants in the early 1960s swept aside many qualified Blacks. In 1965-66 there were no Blacks among the more than 1,100 students in the School. This led the faculty to embark upon an innovative minority group program involving active recruitment of members of minority groups and a reconsideration of the application of mechanical admission standards to students who might have suffered cultural disadvantages. In sharp contrast to 1965-66, the 1971-72 regular session student body of 1,245 included 107 members of minority groups.
The first year that women were admitted to the University — 1870 — saw two enrolled in the Law Department. During the last decade more and more women have chosen to study law and have sought admission to the Law School. Although the 1959-60 regular session enrollment of 873 included only 11 women, by 1971-72, the regular session enrollment of 1,245 included 128 women.
In the latter half of the 1960s, students began to take an increasingly active role in Law School affairs. In 1967 a faculty-student liaison committee was created and, by 1970, students served on most faculty committees. The Law School student government became the Law School Student Senate in 1970. A weekly student newspaper, Res Gestae, keeps students and faculty members informed about Law School life. The Black Law Students' Alliance, the Women Law Students' Association, and La Raza Law Students address themselves to the problems of various constituencies of the Law School.
In 1965-66, the Legal Aid Society of the Law School became active in the Washtenaw County Legal Aid Clinic. Since that year, there is also an Inmate Assistance Program, which provides legal assistance to inmates of nearby prisons, and a Legislative Aid Bureau, which provides a free drafting service for state and local governments that lack the resources to research and draft proposed statutes and ordinances.
Charles A. Lowenhaupt
The University of Michigan, an Encyclopedic Survey Supplement, Pages 168 - 175.
