An Anniversary Message from the Dean

An Anniversary Message from the Dean

This year marks an important birthday anniversary for the Law School. The Class of 1968 is the School’s 75th graduating class.

In recognition of the School’s 75th year, this issue of “Stanford Lawyer” bears on its cover the portrait of Nathan Abbott, the first head of the School and the guiding figure in its early development. When the Law Department first opened its doors in 1893, it had an unusual faculty of two. One was the University librarian. The other was Benjamin Harrison, former President of the United States, who taught international law. But Nathan Abbott was Stanford’s first full-time professor of law. A gentle, scholarly man whose major interests were Latin poetry, the subtleties of 14th century land tenures and his garden, Abbott assembled around him the School’s first small faculty and imparted to it from its very beginning a standard of rigor and commitment to excellence that most schools attain, if they attain them at all, only after a long period of internal development. Nathan Abbott remained head of the School until 1907 when he left Stanford to become a member of the Columbia law faculty, leaving behind him an unpayable debt of gratitude.

Some things have changed at the Law School since 1893.

Stanford law students used to be drawn mainly from the immediate vicinity; today the School’s students are from every part of the United States. Admission to law study at Stanford in 1893 was not keenly competitive; this year 1,700 students will apply for the 150 places in next fall’s entering class. In 1893, because of the size of the University’s endowment, tuition was zero; now the University’s endowment per student has dropped from first in the nation to 27th, with endowment income today paying for only 18% of the operating costs of the University as costs have risen. Tuition charges in fall 1968 will be $1920 and will doubtless continue to rise.

Living alumni who hold a law degree from the Law School number about 3200, of whom about 70 were graduated in the School’s first quarter century, about 750 in its second, and about 2,450 in the last 25 years.

The faculty has moved from the era of great remembered names of Hohfeld and Huberich, through that of Cathcart and Vernier, to that of the men who are the School’s current professors emeriti–Walter Bingham, Marion Kirkwood, George Osborne, William Owens, Harry Rathbun, Harold Shepherd and Lowell Turrentine. Taking their place in the classroom is a young and still growing faculty of great strength and promise.

Beginning from nothing, the School developed over the years an excellent working library. Today it has stepped up to a long, expensive task of assembling a legal research collection of first quality through escalation of current acquisitions and the start of a pursuit for additional needed volumes that were published at an earlier time.

The same order of progression may be seen in the School’s physical facilities. Originally homeless, with a couple of classrooms assigned to it in the inner Quadrangle, the Law School achieved physical recognition of its coherent self when in 1949 it moved into the remodeled administration building. Now, a generation later, with students, faculty and books overflowing the present law building, the School is looking forward to having its first home specifically designed for Law School use and for its own needs-a building to house 500 students, a faculty of 40 and a library of 500,000 volumes. If the necessary financing can be found, it is hoped that construction of the building will begin in the fall of 1969, with a targeted completion date of 1971.

There have been changes at the Law School over its 75 years of institutional life. But its most important element–Nathan Abbott’s conception of the Stanford School of Law as a small school of the highest professional and scholarly excellence in the law–has not changed, and will not change as the School moves past its 75th anniversary and into its future of centuries.

–Bayless Manning