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The
Transformative Years
of the
University of Alabama
Law School, 1966–1970
Daniel John Meador
Foreword by Judge Truman Hobbs
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by Daniel John Meador
NONFICTION
Preludes to Gideon (1967)
Criminal Appeals—English Practices and American Reforms (1973)
Mr. Justice Black and His Books (1974)
Appellate Courts—Staff and Process in the Crisis of Volume (1974)
Justice on Appeal (with P. Carrington and M. Rosenberg; 1976)
Impressions of Law in East Germany (1986)
Appellate Courts in the United States (2d ed., 2006)
American Courts (3d ed., with G. Mitchell; 2009)
FICTION
His Father’s House (1994)
Unforgotten (1998)
Remberton (2007)
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2012 by Daniel J. Meador. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60306-152-0
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-153-7
LCCN: 2011052270
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
To the memory of Jan,
who sustained me through it all
and graciously served as
unofficial Law School hostess
Contents
2 - The Law School Foundation and Law Alumni
7 - Student Life and Activities
9 - Farrah Hall and a New Building
Truman Hobbs
United States District Judge
In the summer of 1965, Dr. Frank Rose, president of the University of Alabama, decided that the University of Alabama Law School needed a dean to advance it further along the road of academic excellence. He contacted a young native Alabamian, Dan Meador, a graduate of the University of Alabama’s Law School. Meador in 1965 was a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. Dr. Rose requested that Professor Meador come back to head his home-state law school as its dean. Meador accepted the call—pending completion of a Fulbright Lectureship in England—and more than forty years later he has written this book describing the vision he had as the new dean and the success he had in implementing that vision in the four years that he served.
He knew that success in achieving the vision could not be possible by a dean acting alone. The book describes his efforts and success in enlisting a number of able graduates, faculty, and friends of the law school to join in the vision for an even better law school. The new dean chose well in those whom he asked to serve. Many were busy lawyers in the state of Alabama, and the hard work they undertook was a credit to them and was vital to achieving the new vision for the law school.
Dean Meador had the requisite background for the task he was assuming. He held degrees from Auburn University, the University of Alabama Law School, and Harvard University. He had served as a law clerk to a distinguished University of Alabama Law School graduate, Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black. He was chairman of the Southeastern Conference of American Law Schools and had served on American Bar Association accreditation committees to evaluate the law schools at Duke and Vanderbilt.
Meador took as his challenge the moving of the Alabama Law School to a higher level of quality in every respect. This challenge required securing substantial funding beyond state appropriations, which required enlisting the busy lawyers mentioned above, who also wanted the best for the Alabama Law School. The state of Alabama, and the South generally, had not previously established a strong tradition of charitable giving by its attorneys. There was a generally accepted view that a state law school should be supported by state funds. But more and more state schools were finding that state funds alone were inadequate to provide the improvements that were wanted if a state law school was to achieve the desired level of excellence. In Meador’s first year as dean of the Alabama Law School, he increased contributions from private sources by more than sevenfold. Dr. Rose also fulfilled his promises and the University increased the funding that it provided to the 1aw school by almost a third.
Great progress was made at the University of Alabama Law School in the four years that Dan Meador was its dean. President Rose was pleased with the progress and was very supportive of Meador’s vision, but in 1969 he resigned as president of the University.
Soon after, Dean Meador was asked if he would return to the Virginia Law School to take over the James Monroe Professorship. He had always expected someday to return to being a full-time law professor, which had more personal appeal to him than the administrative responsibilities of a dean.
Dr. Rose had been beneficial in effecting the changes made under