Dedication to Professor Emeritus John E. Sullivan and His Devotion to Others

• Author: Michael Distelhorst - Lance Tibbles
• Pages: i-iii

DEDICATION TO PROFESSOR EMERITUS JOHN E.

SULLIVAN AND HIS DEVOTION TO OTHERS

MICHAEL DISTELHORST AND LANCE TIBBLES

This issue of the Capital University Law Review is dedicated to the

memory of John E. Sullivan, who died on August 31, 2011 at age eighty-

nine. Professor John Sullivan, a beloved teacher and scholar, joined the

Capital University Law School faculty in 1953 when it was still known as

Franklin University Law School. By 1988, when he retired from active

teaching and received emeritus status, he had taught nearly 90% of all

living graduates of the Law School. In addition to his extraordinary

devotion to the Law School’s students and alumni through his gifted and

brilliant classroom teaching, Professor Sullivan served as Acting Dean

from 1959 to 1960 and as Academic Dean from 1965 to 1966.

After his formal retirement in 1988, Professor Sullivan continued to be

a very important figure in the life of t he Law School. Each year, until the

very end of his life, Professor Sullivan and his wife Mary Jane

enthusiastically attended the annual Sullivan Lecture Series, which was

endowed in his honor to feature presentations by some of the nation’s

leading legal scholars and practitioners. Moreover, in 2007, Professor

Sullivan was honored when the Law School created the John E. Sullivan

Professorship, named on his behalf to continue the finest traditions of law

school teaching and scholarship that his life in the law so clearly

represented.

John Sullivan was a brilliant and extremely masterful classroom

teacher. John hardly ever answered a question without citing at least one

case from his vast reservoir of scholarship and knowledge of the law.

Groups of students would mingle after a class somewhat in awe of the

learning experience his class had been, often expressing how much they

were coming to love the law as a result of this master.

Although John was best known as a teacher of torts, he also delighted

in teaching criminal law and consumer law. Some fortunate students had

the opportunity to take him for torts in their first year and then return for

more “Sullivan” later in their law school careers. Those students, who are

now alumni, regularly report that John Sullivan was a magnificent

classroom teacher in all of the classes that he taught.

Those students also report that John required them to earn the right to

be a lawyer. The right would not be theirs without diligence and

demonstrated competence on their part. John realized that to preserve the

Law School as a viable professional school, true to its heritage of