An Oral History: Royal C. Rubright

• Publication year: 1997
• Pages: 31

26 Colo.Law. 31 Colorado Lawyer 1997.

1997, November, Pg. 31. An Oral History: Royal C. Rubright

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31

Vol.26, No. 11, Pg. 31

The Colorado Lawyer
November 1997
Vol. 26, No. 11 [Page 31]

Features

An Oral History: Royal C. Rubright
by Charlton Carpenter

This is the sixth in a series of articles on distinguished Colorado lawyers that will be printed in The Colorado Lawyer based on interviews by members of the Colorado Bar Association Centennial Committee. The project is part of the CBA's 100th anniversary celebration, and it is an effort to capture our history. This interview was conducted by Charlton Carpenter. An edited transcript of the interview follows

Royal C. Rubright
Q: This is an appropriate place to do an interview with you We're sitting in the Rubright Conference Room at Fairfield and Woods (on the 24th floor of One Norwest Center in downtown Denver), where you and I were partners for many years. Your picture is on the wall, and it shows you in the process of examining some abstracts, which you spent a lot of time doing here. I know you went to the University of Colorado, where you got both your undergraduate and law degrees. Where did you begin the practice of law?

A: I first went to Johnstown, a little town halfway between Greeley and Fort Collins. The town was nice enough to let me stay in the city office. I had one volume of statutes, the 1921 Sessions Laws, and that's all I had in the way of law books. But I got acquainted with the lawyers in Greeley, which is the nearest town, and they were extremely helpful for a young lawyer. Jim Marsh was the City Attorney. I was only up there several months and then came down to Denver to be a Denver lawyer.

Q: And from there, when did you come to Fairfield and Woods?

A: In 1940. Before then I'd been with Karl Brauns doing a lot of title examining for the Denver National Bank and their loans. Then I got acquainted with Dick Brown who was examining titles for Fairfield and Woods. We'd meet in the record room, so when Dick went to the International Trust Company in their Trust Department, he recommended me to Fairfield and Woods, which then gave me a job in 1940.

Q: I've always heard you referred to as the "Dean" of Real Estate Attorneys, and over the years I've been proud to be on the faculty with the Dean. How did that nickname come about?

A: Well I don't know that it's justified in the first place, but I found it very rewarding to practice in a relatively narrow field of law and to specialize in it and do the kind of things like cannibalizing cases and readings and memorizing almost all of the statute so that you're on top of everything all the time. In that connection, I taught at DU for five or six years, Real Estate Titles, and did occasional lectures at the University of Colorado on real estate matters. For a while, I was reviewing the cases each year decided by the Colorado Supreme Court at the CBA convention. I was telling lawyers what the Court had decided because I had spent my time reading about those cases and working with them during the year. I got the publicity, if you will, by having to appear at the convention for several years. Then I wrote some articles for the Denver bar journal, DICTA. I also served for a number of years on the Real Estate Title Standards Committee, and I drafted some of the introductory statements they used--so that was fun, too.

Q: Who were the people on that committee, do you recollect?

A: Oh, goodness. They changed so often. But I remember Don Lesher, Percy Morris, your fishing friend Charlie Rhyne, and Aldo Notariani. The committee started in the '40s...