The Face of the Law School
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The University of Virginia School of Law UVALawyer Fall 2004 The Face of the Law School The University of Virginia School of Law contents UVALawyer Fall 2004 Vol. 28, No. 2 Departments 3 Dean’s Message 4 Law School News 22 Faculty Briefs 4 57 Class Notes 82 In Memoriam 84 In Print 88 Opinion: 32 Corporate Diversity is Invaluable and Incomplete Charles Tribbett III ’80 Features 32 A Man for the Season: Don Yee ’87 Cullen Couch 38 38 Center Sparks Dialogue on Race and Law Denise Forster EDITOR Cullen Couch 42 Behind the Scenes of Brown: E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr. ’53 ASSOCIATE EDITOR Denise Forster Cullen Couch CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Margaret Heritage, Earthen Johnson, Luana Mendes-Martinez, 48 Bakke Revisited Mike Marshall, Mary Wood John C. Jeffries, Jr. ’73 DESIGN roseberries 52 Klarman Offers New Argument on Origin and Effects of Brown PHOTOGRAPHY Tom Cogill Cullen Couch ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY Ian Bradshaw, Cullen Couch, Susan Baker Kalergis PRINTING Schmitz Press Department text starts here after head 2 Spring2004 dean’s message The Face of the Law School I John C. Jeffries, Jr. ’73 This issue of UVALawyer celebrates diversity in the Law School. Diversity, of course, has many dimensions. Perhaps the most important — and certainly the most disputed — is use of diversi- ty as a factor in admissions. At the Law School, assessments of individual applicants begin with intellectual aptitude and academic achievement. We also look for accomplishments and experiences that predict success. These include significant achievement in extracurricular activities, meaningful work experience, successful military service, and contributions to campus or community through service and leadership. Also important are personal qualities, such as a history of growth in response to challenge or differences among our students are far less the ability to meet and overcome disadvantage. prominent than the commonality of the Finally, we seek diversity of all sorts — experience that unites them. The civility, geographic, racial, ethnic, social, economic, and mutual respect, generosity, and affection that ideological. have long characterized the Law School The inclusion of race and ethnicity among community remain vital and vigorous today. In the factors that can influence admission is, of that environment, diversity actually works — as course, deeply and durably controversial. It it should — not to divide or separate but to divides the Supreme Court (with a majority enhance and enrich the education of all. approving our current practice) and the nation at large. My own views are expressed in an Lillian BeVier’s “Charge to the Class” excerpt reprinted elsewhere in these pages, but I Also noted in this issue is Lillian BeVier’s am fully aware that many disagree. Some think “Charge to the Class of 2004.” The idea for this we go too far in seeking diversity among our event came from the students. They asked students; others think we don’t go far enough. Lillian to speak to them about their To the critics of our admissions policy, I opportunities and responsibilities as Law offer one comment. No one should ignore the School graduates. To my knowledge, the class sincere and heartfelt convictions that lay on meeting held for this purpose was the first such both sides of this difficult issue, but I believe event in the history of the Law School, though that concerns about affirmative action generally members of the Class of 2004 hope that others would be substantially allayed by familiarity will follow their lead. with its actual operation here in the Law In any event, you will be interested — and School. Unlike the experience at some other perhaps inspired — to hear what Lillian had to institutions, our students do not divide say. And you will be proud to welcome these themselves into hostile factions. The racial, fine young lawyers as the newest members of ethnic, economic, social, and ideological our alumni family. UVALawyer 3 law school news On the Occasion of the Retirement of Stanley Henderson Law Alumni Weekend — May 1, 2004 Stanley Henderson will always be known — and At the meeting of the Alumni Association, Dean John C. loved — for his success in the classroom. Jeffries, Jr. ’73, introduced the featured speaker: retiring For those of you who had Professor Law Professor Stanley D. Henderson. The Dean’s remarks Henderson in first-year Contracts, you don’t need as well as Mr. Henderson’s address are featured here. my help in recalling the thrill of that experience. For those of you who did not have Stan, you I John C. Jeffries, Jr. ’73 — if you were lucky — had someone like him. Perhaps that person was Hardy Dillard or perhaps IT IS WITH GREAT PERSONAL PLEASURE — Charlie Gregory or perhaps someone else. and also a little sadness — that I rise to But if you were lucky, you had someone introduce Stanley Henderson. who taught you far more than Torts or Stan and I arrived here on the same day. I Contracts. You had someone who taught you was a first-year student — in other words, law — or to put it more conventionally — intellectually a tabula rasa. In contrast, Stan was someone who taught you to think like a lawyer. already an experienced teacher, but new to this The key word in that sentence is not institution. He had graduated from law school “lawyer” but “think.” — at the University of Colorado — in 1961. For many of us, when we learned to “think After clerking for a year, and private practice like a lawyer” was the first time we learned to for two, he entered teaching at the University of “think” much at all. To be sure, we learned to Wyoming in 1964, and rose to the rank of full think in a particular intellectual tradition and professor. He visited Virginia in the fall of 1970, with a particular set of raw materials, but was immediately offered a permanent position, mostly we learned how to think. and has been here ever since. And for that — above all else — we thank Stan is an accomplished scholar. He is the Stan Henderson. author of Dawson, Harvey & Henderson on No one has done it better, or with greater Contracts, now in its eighth edition and one of grace. No one has done it with more civility, the top-10 selling casebooks nationally. with more down-to-the-ground decency in his By the way, the fact that the casebook is dealings with students. And no one has been still called Dawson, Harvey & Henderson is rewarded with greater admiration and affection testimony to Stan’s modesty. Messrs. Dawson than Stan Henderson. and Harvey have long since gone to their Let me quote Stan on law teaching: reward, and Stan has produced the last five “Teaching law is essentially about passing editions of the casebook by himself. on the intellectual culture, especially the It seems to me, Stan, that it is high time inquiring element. that the book be called Henderson & Somebody “It is the business of engaging legal rather than Somebody & Henderson. materials, of doing something with a vast and He is also the co-author of a casebook on untidy body of cases, statutes, and concepts. Labor Law, and if he keeps on schedule — and “My task is to prepare the students for a if you know Stan, you know he will — in 2005 lifetime of self-education.” he will produce a treatise on Labor Law, to be Well, there you have it. That’s as good a published by Foundation Press. short statement of what legal education is — These are very considerable achievements, and should be — as you will ever see. and I don’t mean to diminish them when I say And, Stanley, at that task, we are here to that no matter what fame he enjoys as a scholar, say, you are the master. 4 Fall2004 law school news style, and we thank you for that. We thank you a lot. Worn and weary old Clark Hall, and the Spartan, “no- name” quarters that were the original North Grounds, are — to borrow from Simon & Garfunkel — “but a dream to me now.” Second, there is the make-up of the student body, and the faculty. When I left law school in 1961, there was at best a sprinkling of women and minorities in the nation’s professional schools, including the top law schools. In my first Contracts class at Virginia (John Jeffries’s class), 120 students in all, there were two black men and eight women, Dean Jeffries and reunion attendees demonstrate their affection for Stan one a black. Henderson after his address. To be sure, the constraining norms of our nation’s earlier times were gradually eroded. Led by Al Reflections on a Career Turnbull (and faculty like Charlie Whitebread on the Admissions Teaching the Law Committee), we worked very hard to make law study here a more I Stanley D. Henderson attractive option for those who had found it unattractive. Our classes I DIDN’T INTEND TO GROW OLDER AND FACE have for some time now looked more and more retirement. It has all happened by accident. It like the people who live in America. Yet the wasn’t supposed to happen to me, only to others. struggle to build a stable consensus for diversity I met my wife Dee many years ago in a continues. This school, going back to Dean college Speech class. Based on that encounter, Ribble’s fight against “massive resistance” in the she first thought I was destined to be a 1950s, has demonstrated that it will stand on preacher. That was not in the cards, but I the right side of any debate over whether eventually became a teacher.