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Welcome Message from the President
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Starting a Law School
People often ask me how I came to start Thomas Cooley Law School.
The question is innocent and benign enough as a rule, though sometimes it sounds like, "What on earth could you have been thinking of when you established an institution that you should have known would flood the civilized world with hordes of litigious monsters, hell bent on suing everybody for every little thing that happens?"
I long ago gave up on trying to assuage the rage of the anti-lawyer crowd. Lawyers don't cause lawsuits any more than undertakers cause funerals or caterers cause weddings, I tell them. They have no logical response, but they remain convinced that our profession is a curse on society.
Fortunately, most of the people who ask me why I started the law school really want to know the history and background of Cooley. They see it, accurately, I can testify, as a daunting, nigh on impossible undertaking, without the hope of massive personal rewards that often motivates those who launch other enterprises. I'm sure very few people ask Bill Gates why he started Microsoft.
I have a short version of the story that goes something like this: sometime shortly after the newly installed Soapy Williams-John Swainson-led Democratic majority on the Supreme Court returned Thomas Matthew Kavanagh to the office of Chief Justice, thus relegating me to the unhappy role of a conservative voice crying out in a liberal wilderness, I received a telephone call from an old friend and political supporter from Detroit, bail bondsman Chuck Goldfarb, asking me to intercede for his brother who wanted to go to law school. In the early '70s, there were 15 applicants for every law school seat. Chuck figured that a supreme court justice would have some clout with the deans.
Not so. After a few fruitless phone calls, I got back to Chuck and gave him the bad news. The law schools wanted certifiable genius material. We chatted a bit about the tragedy of it all; how so many worthy and capable young men and women were being denied the opportunity to study law and enter our ancient and honorable profession. Almost as a joke, or an after thought, I said to him, "Maybe I ought to start a law school up here in Lansing." Chuck jumped on the idea and promised to send me the first thousand dollar contribution.
That's the story I usually tell. I'm sure it happened, but I'm not sure of the sequence. I do know, because I have a copy of the letter, that in the Spring of 1971 I wrote to the members of the State Board of Law Examiners to tell them that I was thinking of starting a law school in Lansing. Stanley E. Beattie, Chairman of the Law Examiners and a former professor of mine from my student days at the University of Detroit, wrote to commend me on the idea and predict in glowing terms what such an institution would mean to future generations.
Whether immediately or shortly after the Goldfarb phone call, I can't say, but soon enough, I asked my law clerk, John Gibbons, what it would take to start a law school. He had no idea, but agreed to look it up. A day or so later, he came by to tell me that as far as he could see, all I had to do was file articles of incorporation for a non-profit corporation. I asked him what that entailed. "Three incorporators, and a twenty dollar filing fee," John replied. I sent him out to get the forms, and called a young lawyer friend named Louis A. Smith to ask if he would like to help me start a law school. "Whatever you want, Judge", said Lou. Within a few days, the two-page corporate article form was filled out, with John Gibbons, Lou Smith and myself signing as the mandatory three incorporators. I sent John over to the Corporations Division office to file the form, and he graciously did so, advancing the twenty dollar filing fee out of his own pocket.
Naively, I assumed that the clerk would stamp the forms, take the money, and issue a corporate charter. That's the way it had been when I was practicing law and had formed other corporations. Not so this time. The word "school" was in our name and in our corporate purposes. You don't just start a school like you start an auto company. Schools are special, and have to be approved by the State Board of Education. Schools have to meet certain criteria in order to exist.
The lady at the Corporations Division didn't stamp the form. She put it in the drawer. Then she called the office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to tell him that somebody wanted to start a law school, and what was she supposed to do?
She was not the only one who didn't know what to do. There hadn't been a new law school in Michigan since Wayne State was organized in the 1920s. Nobody in office had any experience with such things. So John Porter, then the Superintendent, being a wise and experienced bureaucrat, appointed a committee. An absolutely foolproof, laudable, politically unassailable move. Appoint a committee. And who do you put on the committee? Who else but the people who know all about law schools. How to start them, how to run them. Law school professors and law school deans. That's who.
They called it the Committee of Scholars, saying the name with a certain reverence and deferential awe that suggested that a deliberative body thus constituted would be an infallible oracle. Surely they — the representatives of the legal educational establishment — would know what to do.
The state Corporations Division had already begun to sharpen the veto pencil. They advised me that the name I had selected for my law school was improper. I had called the school The State College of Law. Made sense to me. The school was to be in the state capital. Across the street from the offices of the legislature, the governor and the supreme court. It would interact substantially with the minions of state law.
Unfortunately, the legislature had already spoken on the subject. A statute of long standing proclaimed that no college or university which was not actually and officially an arm and agency of state government could use the word 'state' in its name. Strike one.
It was 1971. The battle had just begun.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004