College of Law Alumni A ssociation • Fall/W inter 1999 jurist, statesman, public servant are award recipients Trading a high-pow ered career for a com puter and a cause U ntangling a legal tw ist R eunion Photos H onor R oll of D onors C O N T E N T S College of Law Administration 1 3 Gregory H. Williams Dean Honor Roll College of Law Alumni of Donors Society Officers Elizabeth J. Watters '90 Friends and alumni President gave more than Jeffrey S. Sutton '90 $1 million last year. President-Elect National Council Officers David A. Ward '58 Chair 2 3 Carla D. Moore '77 Alumni News Vic&Chair Learn what’s new Pamela H. Lombardi Secretary with your classmates. Send address changes and alumni news to: The Law Record OSU College of Law Members of the class of1959 and their spouses get reacquainted during the Deans reception on 3 ° John Deaver Drinko Hall September 17. Pictured left to right are Stuart Summit, New York, N. Y; Doreen and Peter A Jurist, 55 West 12th Avenue Rosato, Yonkers, N. Y; Alan Berman, Cleveland, Ohio; John Lancione, Fairview Park, Ohio; Columbus, OH 43210-1391 and Albert and Jean Bell, Westerville, Ohio. a Statesman, Phone: (614) 292-2631 FAX: (614) 292-1492 a Public Servant [email protected] and a Professor The Law Record is published From the Dean Law Grad Earns Legal Twist Honored for the alumni and friends of The Ohio State University $64,000 in the Ken Robinson ’98 Alumni Awards College of Law “Big Chair” untangles snarl o f recognize the cream Liz Cutler Gates JeffSiehl ’98 has his broken requirements o f the crop. Editor Amanda Alge The Rise 15 minutes o f fame. and unenforced rules. Student Intern of Modem Jane Hoffelt/Pageworks Evidence Law 3 2 Design A View from the College ©2000, College of Law, “British Trials High-Tech In Memoriam o f Law 2000 The Ohio State University Collection” Devotion Our sympathy goes to Alumni Awards Alan Gulker ’54 family andfriends. Call for traded a high Nominations pow ered career Help us recognize Faculty News for a computer our outstanding The activities, and a cause. Development graduates. scholarly and Options for Giving otherwise, Contributions provide o f our faculty. margin o fexcellence. 7 College News Meet the Class o f 2002. A s the twentieth century comes to a close, it is natural to reflect on the more than 100 years of legal education at The Ohio State University College of Law. Like the colleges first students in the late nineteenth century, the men and women in todays classes look to the future with high hopes and great aspirations. Those first students meeting in the Franklin County Courthouse were breaking ground in the field of legal studies. Todays future lawyers are still on the cutting edge as they study areas of law that were unimagined in the 1890s. Academic programs at the College of Law continue to challenge students and prepare them for their roles as our global leaders. The Alternative Dispute Resolution Program and our clinical programs are second to none. Seventy- eight pre-eminent scholars and distinguished lecturers from around the world, including a Justice of the South African Constitutional Court, are participating in workshops, symposia, and lectures offered at the College this year. These programs focus on a variety of important legal issues, Dean Gregory H. Williams shares his vision for diversity in the legal profession with President such as resolution of disputes arising from Internet use, William Jefferson Clinton during a meeting at the White House. The dean was among technology’s impact on intellectual property, and the first members of the legal community who met with President Clinton on July 20 to discuss the president’s diversity agenda. ten years of the Americans with Disabilities Act. You’ll want to read more about them in the Lectures and quarter finals in national competition. Two National Moot Workshops 2000 brochure, found in the center of Court teams representing the College also have competed this magazine. in regional competition. The backbone of these exceptional programs is The Ohio State Law Journal is one of the most cited certainly our talented faculty. I am honored to lead and publications of its kind in the United States. The Ohio State support them. Their research has brought great recognition Journal on Dispute Resolution continues to be the official for the College from across the nation and around the American Bar Association journal on the topic, despite the world. Their scholarly work has been published in existence of a competing law journal at Harvard. More than prestigious law journals like Harvard, Northwestern, and 125 students are involved with both journals. Michigan. They have been quoted in the popular media, Many of the experiences of these men and women at including National Public Radio, The New York Times, the College of Law parallel yours. But in many respects, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Setting an legal education has changed for the better over the past example for our students, several faculty have been selected century. Gone is the stressful practice of eliminating one- for public service at the highest levels: United States Chief third of the admitted students during the first year. Classes Privacy Officer and Ohio Solicitor. Others have served on now comprise nearly an equal number of men and women commissions in Moldova, Italy, and Kosovo. and the number of minority students is on the rise. Following their professors’ leads, our students continue Likewise, the number of women and minorities on our to excel both academically and in extracurricular pursuits. teaching faculty has increased. Participation in the college’s clinical programs, trial The College of Law has come a long way since those practice, moot court, and law journals is an indication first classes in downtown Columbus. It makes me wonder of that strength. More than 100 young men and women what the Dean of the College of Law wifi be writing about will receive practical experience in a clinic this year at the as the twenty-first century rolls into the twenty-second. College, whether it is the Civil Law Practicum or the new Student Housing Legal Clinic. In fact, two third-year Sincerely, students enrolled in the Criminal Prosecution Practicum, Jennifer Coriell and Kelli Curtis, won their first jury trial in the Delaware, Ohio, Municipal Court last fall (see page 5). Teams of Ohio State law students consistently rank high in regional and national moot court competitions. Already this year, the Criminal Procedure Team composed Gregory H. Williams of Ms. Coriell and Erika Van Ausdall advanced to the Dean and Carter C. Kissell Professor of Law I The Rise of Modern Evidence Law: / ' he common-kw system of evidence,” wrote Professor More than mere chronology supports this articles Thayer in 1898, “is radically peculiar. Here, a great thesis. Certain aspects of criminal practice suggest that the mass of evidential matter, logically important and objection was more likely to develop there than in the civil T:probative, is shut out...while the same matter is not thus trial. In particular, lawyers representing criminal defendants Thomas excluded anywhere else.”1 Today, a century later, Thayers had much less power than their counterparts in civil description retains nearly all of its original force. Despite practice. In the late eighteenth century, even as the use of P. Gallanis statutory modifications, Anglo-American law remains lawyers in criminal cases was rising rapidly, the prisoners devoted to the exclusion of otherwise probative testimony, counsel was not allowed to do much more than cross- an attitude wholly unfathomable to lawyers trained, for examine the victim and the other witnesses supporting the example, in the civilian systems of Continental Europe. charge. Significandy, he was not allowed to address the jury. How, when, and why did this quintessentially Anglo- On this point, an Old Bailey judge in 1790 was emphatic; American approach to testimony develop? There seems to as he told the prisoner, “Your counsel cannot speak for you. be a working assumption among legal historians that this If you have any account to give of yourself to the jury. approach developed first in civil trials, where lawyers had or if you have any thing to observe on the evidence, you been active for centuries, and that it spread to criminal must do it yourself.”2 trials in the 1780s when lawyers began doing regular This restriction on defense counsel remained formally criminal work. On its face, the working assumption seems in place until 1836 and had important implications for plausible. The only problem is that a collection of primary evidentiary practice. Lawyers in civil litigation could speak sources, used in this article for the first time, points in direcdy to the jury, which enabled them to explain away exacdy the opposite direction. The “British Trials” unsafe testimony or to disparage its reliability. In contrast, collection (see box on page 3 for more detail) contains lawyers representing criminal defendants were forced to Professor Thomas P. Gallanis more than one thousand pamphlet accounts of civil and focus their energies on vigorous cross-examination and the criminal trials from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and use of evidentiary objections. This new level of courtroom nineteenth centuries. These pamphlets, many of which warfare alarmed observers at the time, but it was the logical contain near-verbatim accounts of what happened in court, response to the limited ways in which lawyers were able to reveal that the routine use of the objection to block act on behalf of their clients.