The bow-tie era of Lewis and Clark law school: Dean Jim Huffman, 1993-2006.

• Author: Blumm, Michael C.
• Position: Testimonial

In 1993, our law school--then in its 109th year--made a decision that in retrospect may seem inadvertent but was quite beneficent: we opted for bow-ties in the dean's office. For the next thirteen years, we were graced with a bow-tie beneath our dean's smiling face. We clearly made a wise decision in 1993: for behind that bow-tie was Jim Huffman, my friend since the day I met him in 1977, at lunch in General Miles' stable in northwest Washington, D.C.

Huffman presided over the greatest era of growth in the history of our law school, and he certainly has a claim to being the greatest dean in our law school's history, although it is a precarious claim, as our best days are clearly ahead. But Jim's claim is a substantial one: he built astonishing buildings, most prominently Wood Hall, making our physical facilities the match of any law school in the country (and no law school anywhere in the world has a better setting, as we are adjacent to a wonderous wilderness park), promoted diverse scholarship, and enhanced faculty collegiality. The Huffman years saw our law school mature into one of the best schools in the West and, we think, the nation--at least if you care about the quality of instruction, and you can ask our students about that.

During Huffman's tenure, we were regularly rated as the finest environmental law school in the country, a status we earned over thirty-five years of promoting environmental law in our curriculum, our publications, our clinics, our moot courts, and our conferences. We have successfully defended that ranking against a considerable amount of competition that has arisen from many sources in the last decade or so, due in no small measure to Jim's willingness to support expansions of our environmental faculty, clinics, staff, and curriculum.

Our flagship publication, Environmental Law, antedated Huffman's arrival on the law faculty by three years, due to the prescience of our legendary faculty member, Billy Williamson, who founded the publication in 1970. But Huffman was quite prescient himself, founding the Natural Resources Law Institute in 1974, which produced more than thirty years of fellows, including faculty at our school (Dan Rohlf and myself), Buffalo (Errol Meidinger, who is now back at the law school, serving his second fellowship in '06), and Vermont (Pat Parenteau). The Huffman years also saw several of our students become faculty members at other law schools, including Indiana-Indianapolis (Dan Cole)...