Schools

The Law School

The 1917 bulletin of the School of Law noted that the trustees of Emory University, in establishing the school, fully understood "that there can be no excuse for its existence if it is to do no more than simply increase by one the number of law schools of the type which already exists in the South." The typical law school, the bulletin noted, was merely "over-supplying in numbers the demand for lawyers" and exacerbating the "overcrowded" profession, while failing to meet the demand for "properly trained lawyers." Having in view an overarching and ideal aim of leading the South to set higher professional standards, the trustees authorized a school whose own bar would be set quite high.

Reaching for a name to attach to the school, as they had done for the Candler School of Theology, the trustees apparently hit upon the most distinguished lawyer to graduate from Emory College. L. Q. C. Lamar (1845C), whose death in 1893 was still within memory of many of the trustees, had achieved the eminence of a United States Supreme Court justice. And so the Lamar School of Law was born in the spring of 1916, welcoming its first class that September. Chancellor Candler reported to the board in June that the Law Building (under construction at a cost of $75,000) "will be ready for use by September, and it is not too much to say that it will be one of the most beautiful and commodious law buildings in America. In form, comfort and convenience, it will lack nothing."

Indeed, only seven years later, in 1923, the American Bar Association rated Emory the only "Class A" law school in Georgia, and one of only three A-rated law schools in the entire Southeast (along with those at the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee). The first faculty had earned their law degrees at Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, and Yale; the library contained more than five thousand volumes; and the curriculum required three years of graduate work. Tuition cost $125 the first year.

However commodious the original Law Building may have been, by the 1960s the school had outgrown it; in 1972 Gambrell Hall, built on the site of the former University president's home, was dedicated as the new home for the school. The Lamar name was quietly but unofficially dropped, and the name Emory Law School lifted the profile of the school along with the profile of the University. By 1996, growth in the faculty and student body had made even Gambrell Hall very crowded, and relief came with the construction of a new library, named for alumnus and benefactor Hugh F. MacMillan (1934L).

Over the decades the law school has done much to live up to the ideals on which it was founded. It was the first division on the Druid Hills campus to admit women. And during the 1962 integration fight, Dean Ben F. Johnson Jr. joined Board Chair Henry L. Bowden in representing the University's position before the Georgia Supreme Court. Enrolling its first black student, Ted Smith, in 1963, the school quickly moved to open the doors to underrepresented minorities, launching an intensive effort to recruit African-American students in 1966. The following year the school opened the Emory Community Legal Services Center to help provide legal services to the poor of Atlanta.

The years since have seen the implementation of programs in public-interest law, environmental law, and law and religion. One of the school's most visible emphases can be found in its emphasis on professional ethics, through the Robert Jones Lectureship in Legal Ethics and the Sam Nunn Chair in Ethics and Professionalism.

Source:  Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836.