Executive Director's Report, 0513 ALBJ, 74 The Alabama Lawyer 162 (2013)
| Author | Keith B. Norman |
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\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0Dan Meador: A Lawyer, Gentleman and Scholar
\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0Our bar and the legal profession lost one of its giants with the death of Dan Meador in February. (See memorial by Fournier J. “Boots” Gale at http://www. alabar.org/publications/al-lawyer-full/ march2013/index.html.) Dan’s death brings to memory the first time I met him. He was visiting the Alabama State Bar not long after I started to work here. That was more than two decades ago.
\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0The mild-mannered Greenville native was then a professor at the University of Virginia Law School and one of the country’s leading constitutional scholars. A graduate of the University of Alabama Law School, Dan clerked for Justice Hugo Black and practiced law in Birmingham before he embarked on an academic career at the University of Virginia. He would later return to Alabama during the turbulent period of the ’60s to serve for four years as the dean of the law school.
\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0My first acquaintance with Dan actually occurred 15 years before we met. In the fall of 1978, our law school class was the first to begin and finish in the new Law Center on the Alabama campus.
\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0The new building was first conceived by Dan, who engaged noted architect Edward Durell Stone to design the facility. Although the building was started and finished a number of years following his deanship (1966-1970), it was, nevertheless, symbolic of the many reforms Dan instituted at the law school that long outlived his tenure there.
\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0His vision was to transform the law school into an institution of national excellence. The academic programs were reformed, faculty recruitment was enhanced, the law school library was enlarged and the admissions and enrollment process was restructured. To help achieve his far-ranging goals for the school, Dan increased private funding by broadening the contributing base of the law school foundation.
\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0\xA0Dan’s ambitious plans were not popular with some inside as well as outside the university and ultimately lead to his resignation. He returned to the University of Virginia as the James Monroe Professor of...
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