USC Law School Wasn’t First ‘in the Southwest’

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Page 7

PERSPECTIVES (Column)

USC Law School Wasn’t First ‘in the Southwest’—Not by a Long Shot

By ROGER M. GRACE

The law school at the University of Southern California was “the first law school in the Southwest,” USC’s website proclaims. It isn’t so.

The USC Gould School of Law claims a founding date of 1897 which is when the Los Angeles Law School opened. USC developed an alliance with that school, and in 1901 bestowed degrees on the seven members of the school’s first and only graduating class. As my last column pointed out, the school went out of existence in 1901; a different school came into being that year, and it was the new institution, the Los Angeles College of Law, which USC took over in 1904.

Whether the USC Gould School of Law is deemed to go back to 1897 or to 1901, its claim of having been the “first law school in the southwest” is unsupportable. In previous columns I’ve pointed out that the Southern California College of Law was in operation in Los Angeles from 1892-94.

What’s more, the Southwest includes several states...including Texas and Colorado, where law schools existed decades before the one assimilated by USC in 1904.

On March 17, 1855, the website of the Texas Historical Assn. says, “the first law school in Texas was established at Austin College” in Huntsville. It continues:

“Previously, all legal training in Texas had taken place by apprenticeship. The innovation was discontinued at Austin College after four students had completed the one-year course….”

Austin College still exists. Its March, 2009 magazine muses:

“Had the law school survived the money problems that doomed it, today it would be among the oldest dozen law schools in the U.S.”

The college is now in Sherman, Texas—but the Huntsville building in which its law school was housed is extant (on the campus of the Sam Houston State University) and a plaque on it commemorates the “FIRST LAW SCHOOL IN TEXAS.”

Further refutation of USC’s claim of having the first law school in the Southwest is that law was being taught at Baylor University—then in Independence, now located in Waco—in the latter part of the 1850s. Its law school was apparently the second in the Southwest.

Meandering from the matter of the first-in-Southwest distinction being invalidity claimed by the USC Law School, I would note that Baylor, too, does a bit of boasting predicated on fantasy. Its law school’s website says: “Established in 1857, Baylor Law School is the oldest law school in Texas and the second law school to be founded west of the Mississippi.”

However, an article on the website admits that “Baylor Law School suspended operations during the Civil War,” that “the law school suspended operations once again [in] 1871,” resumed them, but stopped teaching law when “the School of Law at Texas University opened” in 1883. The article says that “law classes would not be offered on a regular basis at Baylor for another thirty-seven years.”

Baylor’s initial law school did proceed on an on-again, off-again basis. A postbellum report on Baylor in the Galveston News on Oct. 10, 1865, says: “The Law School will be resumed at an early day.”

The Aug. 24, 1869 edition of that paper, alluding to the previous year’s catalogue, observes: “The course of instruction in the Law Department is full and is conducted on the best modern plan.” But classes apparently did not reconvene in September. The Nov. 21, 1869 issue reports that the Board of Trustees on Nov. 3 passed a resolution calling for the selection of a committee to “make all needful arrangements for reopening the Law Department of Baylor University, in the town of Brenham.”

The law school did move to Brenham, 12 miles from Independence. Newspaper ads in the summer through fall of 1879 sought to recruit students for the school’s upcoming term in Brenham, commencing Oct. 8. The Nov. 22 issue of the Galveston news contains an article, datelined Brenham, saying:

“The law school of Baylor university has been temporarily established here….The class is a large one, and composed of energetic young men, representing a large number of the leading families of this county.”

Ads in 1880 similarly sought to lure enrollees to the school.

That valorous Texas school of the wild west era was soon to “bite the dust,” in light of the law school opening (with but two professors) at the new state university in Austin.

But Baylor did later again provide instruction in law. A story bearing a Waco dateline in the Dec. 26, 1919 issue of the Galveston Daily News reports: “It has been decided by the board of trustees of Baylor University to add a department of business administration and a law school to the curriculum.”

The December, 1923 issue of the American Law School Review contains an item which recites:

“The Law School of Baylor University was established in October, 1920; 12 students entering that year. The first graduates received their diplomas in June, 1923.”

An article in the Galveston paper on Nov. 15, 1923 advises: “Baylor now has a law school.” It goes on to say: “The law school was started three years ago. [¶] Five men were graduated in law last [school] year and all were admitted to the bar without examination.”

There was no pretense when the new law school was established in Waco in 1920—in a time of Prohibition, flappers, jazz, and that new-fangled gizmo, the radio—that it was the same school that had operated 114 miles away in Brenham nearly four decades in the past, an era of horse thieves, lynchings, gas lamps and stage coaches.

Can you imagine interviewing the dean of the Baylor Law School in 1920, laboring under the notion that this was the same school that had ceased operations in the 1880s?

“Q. So, you’re succeeding Dean James E. Shepard?

“A. Who?

“Q. The dean who was in charge of your school when it was in Brenham.

“A. Where?”

Baylor’s current law school was not founded in 1857. The existence of Baylor’s first law school in 1857 does refute USC’s claim to having been the earliest law school in the Southwest, but the present law school at Baylor antedates USC’s by about 20 years.

The third law school established in Texas—the University of Texas School of Law (alma mater of my wife and mine)—is the oldest law school in the state, having opened its doors, as noted, in 1883. It’s senior to the law school at USC (our undergraduate alma mater).

Also operating in Texas earlier than USC’s law school was another one. The Fort Worth Gazette’s May 26, 1893 edition makes reference to the Fort Worth University’s “new law school, which in its happy and extensive provisions, has become a matter of very wide interest.” The article predicts that it “will no doubt command the interest and presence of a large number of young men.”

It didn’t. Yale Law School Dean Henry Wade Rogers in 1906 said in an address to the Association of American Law Schools, of which he was president:

“A law school was established in 1893 in connection with Fort Worth University. Its catalogue fails to show that any students were in attendance during the past year.”

The 1921 book “Training for the Public Profession of the Law” by Alfred Zantzinger Reed lists the sunset date of Fort Worth’s law school as 1907.

In any event, that law school came before USC’s law school, the purported “first” one in the Southwest.

“The University of Colorado Law School was established in 1892,” the school’s website proclaims.

Likewise, the website of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law says: “The University of Denver College of Law opened its doors in 1892, pioneering legal education on America’s frontier and graduating many of the attorneys and judges who built the legal structure of America’s Mountain West.”

While there appears to have been some initial hesitancy as to recognizing the University of Denver as having a full-fledged law school, any such hesitancy was momentary.

Louis Richard Klemm’s “Report on Legal Education” prepared for the American Bar Association and published by the United States Bureau of Education in 1893 includes the Law School of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.” among the nation’s law schools, mentioned that it was “organized in May, 1892” and that it had 14 instructors and that there were “36 weeks in a school year.” The University of Denver is merely listed among colleges offering a law course in undergraduate school.

However, a report by the U.S. commissioner of education with respect to the 1896-97 school year recognizes the existence of both Colorado law schools and indicates that both were established in 1892.

A Feb. 21, 1897 biographical blurb by the Davenport (Iowa) Daily Republican mentions that J.D. Metzger worked in a law office, then “took a two year course in the Denver law school and in 1894 was admitted to the bar.”

The Aug. 23, 1895 edition of the Central Law Journal, a weekly legal newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, contains these ads:

Newspaper reports show that on Aug. 22, 1901, both Colorado law schools were admitted to membership in the Association of American Law Schools, at the same time as Stanford and others.

In light of three law schools having started in Texas and two in Colorado before the law school which came to be owned by USC, how can USC possibly be contending, as it does, that “[t]he University of Southern California Law School was the first law school in the Southwest”?

And how, with this error having been pointed out, will it continue to make the claim?

What USC can legitimately declare is having the oldest law school in Southern California—that, and no more.

‘MYSTERY SCHOOL’—In 1901, the year Los Angeles Law School ended operations and Los Angeles College of Law was established, there was, seemingly, a third law school in existence here. I don’t know the name of it.

I know of it from a classified ad that appears recurringly in issues of the Times starting on May 23, 1901, reading:

“LAW SCHOOL, DAY AND NIGHT, PRE-

“pares for Supreme Court, 129 W. 2D, room 22.”

It wasn’t the Los Angeles Law School; according to the June, 1901 city directory, that school was in rooms 7-8 of the Muskegon Block, at 307 S. Broadway (now the site of the Million Dollar Theater).

The new Los Angeles College of Law was not yet formed—and when it did open in September, it was located in the Copp Building at 218 S. Broadway (now a Los Angeles Times parking lot).

In 1901, 129 W. Second Street was the address of the Burdick Building, erected at the northeast corner of Second and Spring Streets on a lot purchased in 1873 from Cyrus Burdick by Fred Eaton, later mayor of Los Angeles.

There’s one clue. A Sept. 29, 1901, a classified ad in the Times reads:

“LAW SCHOOL—

“NOW OPEN.

“DAY AND EVENING.

“142 S. BROADWAY, room 108.”

The identity of the lessee of Room 108 can be ascertained. The Sept. 15, 1901 issue of the Times contains this item:

“J. Marion Brooks has removed his law office to rooms 105-108 Hellman Building, 142 S. Broadway.”

Was Brooks—who had been U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California in 1887-88—trying to supplement his income by teaching law?

It would seem so...except for a piece that doesn’t fit. Brooks’ previous law office had not been in the Burdick Building. The June, 1901 city directory shows no attorney in that building. Ditto for directories issued in September and in October of 1900.

It’s conceivable that Brooks, whose office had been in the old Hellman Building at 233 West 2nd, had rented space one block to the west, in the Burdick Building, for his law school—and in moving to the new Hellman Building on Broadway, had enough space both for his law office and the school. Maybe. Or, it could be that he subleased space to the law school, and had no part in its operations.

The ads for the school were only in the Times. Suggesting that Brooks didn’t place them is that the newspaper he favored for placement of classified ads for his law office was the Herald.

It is, of course, possible the school never attracted any students.

Information might surface about the school; for now, it’s a puzzlement.

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