Ashes and the Phoenix.

• Author: Lansing, Ronald B.
• Position: Law school accreditation

The following six excerpts are from my book manuscript (a memoir in progress) tentatively titled Crystallizing: The Accreditation Era of Northwestern School of Lewis & Clark Law School (1965-1974). The excerpts focus on the first five or six years of the forty-year old Environmental Law. The segments, taken out of context, will be better understood with these background materials:

1) My account of that era is a memoir. I lived the times as one of the five original faculty. The text, therefore, is written in first-person, from my witness and research.

2) The era began in 1965 when two venerable colleges merged--one a law school and the other a liberal arts and sciences school. Both traced their origins back to Oregon pioneer times in the 1800s. Joined they became contractually titled Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College.

3) In spite of its veneration and strong acceptance in the bench and bar of Oregon, the law school had never bothered to become recognized by the two national law school accrediting agencies: the American Bar Association (ALIA) and the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). Now, in 1966, the school began upon that quest.

4) Among many accrediting requirements was the need for building a law school complex. The law school and its evening education never had a home of its own. It had operated out of various rented quarters in downtown Portland. Having moved to the Lewis and Clark campus, the law school still did not have its own building complex. Nighttime law education was temporarily spread throughout the campus, once undergrad classes were put to bed Schooling was conducted in chemistry, literature, and other liberal arts and sciences classrooms. The 7000-book law library was in the basement of a music hall. Law school headquarters were improvised in two residential homes owned by the college and shared by the language department. A law dean, associate dean, four professors, and three staff were of officed in bedrooms, dining rooms, and kitchens. My office was the living room in one of the houses. The law school was quartered in that fashion for four years, in wait for the building of its Tryon Forest home, which was not completed until fall semester of 1970.

5) Lewis and Clark college trustees and administrators had a heavy hand in its new law school management. The trustees created a Standing Committee on the Operation of the Law School (SCOLS), composed mainly of trustees, Oregon Supreme Court justices, trial judges, prominent lawyers, and other dignitaries, plus the law school dean and one law professor. SCOLS formed subcommittees on law school admissions, buildings, budget, development, and other ad hoc matters. The small, newborn law faculty was at the threshold of law schooling and just beginning to peek at and squeeze into the business of operations. Paths were fated to cross.

It was in such humble settings that Environmental Law was conceived gestated, born, and christened Here are the six excerpts."

I.

The first stirrings on a prospective law review publication occurred in September 1968 during Dean Jack Cairn's administration and one year before Dean Hal Wren's arrival. A self-appointed student committee sought permission to publish a law review. They were not interested in doing a single symposium book. Instead, they recommended a regularly published, scholarly periodical of the traditional kind. They did the homework on prices and received two estimates from printers--a maximum of $519 for one issue of 2000-3000 copies. That low price, even for the year 1968, seemed naive. The students realized that "we cannot expect to receive any financial aid from the school." So, they did not ask for a budget line. Rather, they proposed raising the money through the sale of published advertisements or donations from graduates. And there was the rub. Any efforts at fund-raising had to be coordinated with the college development office. Publication under college auspices had to pass muster through a chain of command, beginning with the law school faculty and dean and ending with the trustees. A project run by fluctuating student bodies without permanent college personnel to provide advice, stability, and consistency was fated to bog down in the hierarchy. Nothing came of it.

As soon as Dean Wren arrived on campus in late July 1969, he renewed the effort and pushed for a student-operated, faculty-advised law periodical. A law school needed a forum--a soapbox from which to be heard--a voice that would reach beyond our scholastic cloister. That pedestal was classically a formal, scholarly law publication. Although accreditors did not list "law review" as a necessity, all accredited schools had such publications. Wren knew that it was a hallmark that would catch accreditor fancy. Accordingly, the dean appointed another committee of law students to hammer out some preliminaries. This appointment from within the echelons, unlike student self-anointment, was much more savory to those above.

Typical of his mercurial nature, the dean unwittingly picked for the committee chair a student who had failed legal writing. He rectified his selection by formalizing the qualifications for serving on such a committee. Knowing that the committee would likely evolve into the editorial board once publication was approved, he required that committee members be second- or third-year students (not fourth-year seniors) with the top five scholastic grade averages. This gently eliminated his initial chair candidate. The new committee members asked permission to make their own selection of a chair leader. Fully knowing that that selection would also become the selection of an editor in chief, the faculty approved. The student committee chose second-year student Ann Morgenstern from their ranks. Purportedly, they did so because she was the only one of them who did not have a daytime job. But the choice was much wiser than that, as evidenced by subsequent facts: She was to become the law school's first magna cum laude graduate and would serve as the founding editor in chief for the first two years--a tandem never to be duplicated in the law school's periodical history.

The next step was to decide what kind of law periodical we wanted. On that subject, I recall an impromptu get-together in my living room office in the summer of 1969. Dean Wren, Professor Williamson, and I were conversing with Millard Ruud, the new ABA Advisory Consultant. He had made an unannounced stop on his reinspection tour of Pacific Northwest law schools. Conversation turned to our plan for a new law publication. Having been a founding editor of another law review in my student days, I mentioned that a traditional periodical, broad enough to cover all general law topics was in order. Ruud, however, suggested that we should specialize. His experience with the nation's law schools told him that it would be hard for us to compete in the general law arena. Uniqueness, he felt, would gain greater attention for an upstart school elbowing its way into the nationwide law review market. Eventually, a genera] law review might be enticing to authors and readers, but not until our recognition was firmly rooted. It made sense.

In order to put a distinctive face upon the school, Wren was the first to propose the environment as a special field that, as yet, had not received the full attention of legal education. Nationally, there were harbingers making noise about this planet's over-population, litter, and misuse of air, water, and land. Among the most popular and prominent of that advance guard was Lady Bird Johnson, former First Lady of the United States. Professor Billy Williamson voiced a strong second to the dean's proposal. In the weeks ahead, the dean gave Wllliamson the job of faculty liaison to the student committee. The enthusiasm of Chair Morgenstern and her committee for an environmental topic sealed the nature of our new publication.

At a September 17, 1969 faculty meeting, Billy asked the faculty for input on a title to be...