James Chesley Rehberg: Writer and Teacher - Charles R. Adams Iii

• Publication year: 1999

James Chesley Rehberg:

Writer and Teacherby Charles R. Adams III^*

One thing I remember from my first year Property Law course under Professor Rehberg is that the lowest form of property rights belongs to the squatter. Having acquired "squatter's rights" to the position of Mercer Law Review historian,¹ I want to make a few observations about Rehberg's unique contributions to the Review, followed by some of the more enduring Rehberg classroom legends (at least portions of which actually happened).

Think back to 1950. Harry Truman was President, George VI was King of England, Griffin Bell was a promising young Atlanta lawyer, and Bill Clinton and Joe Claxton were both little boys experiencing (from what we gather) very different upbringings. Mercer Law School was located in the Ryals Building on what was then the back side of Mercer's main campus, and up under the building's rafters in the offices of the fledgling Mercer Law Review, a fresh-faced young editor named Bob Hicks was putting together the first Annual Survey of Georgia Law. With his usual prescience, Hicks secured a formidable roster of talented writers, but perhaps even he did not foresee that one of them would stay on for the next half-century. That unique individual was James C. Rehberg, Mercer Law Librarian, not yet risen to the dignity of "Profes- sor," but already hard at work as a legal scholar. His article on "Bar Admission Requirements,"² followed later that school year by a contribution entitled "A Bibliography of Textbooks on Georgia Law,"³ were the first of fifty-three articles that Rehberg would contribute to Mercer Law Review over the next fifty years. I won't try to list them here; the fifty-year index that Mercer is producing will contain them all. Rehberg surveyed various areas of property law through 1964, and in 1965 he began his long-running commentary on "Trusts, Wills, and Administration of Estates" (later changed for some arcane reason to "Wills, Trusts, and Administration of Estates").

Even a cursory review of these articles reveals the magnitude both of the topic and of Rehberg's contribution to it. As an example of how the technology revolution has affected the law of wills, Rehberg wrote as recently as 1977 about a case involving the validity of a will typed on onionskin paper!⁴ He was one of the first to call for a comprehensive revision of Georgia's fiduciary laws. About 1981, his articles began systematically to note inadequacies in the then-current laws, and to set out the case for legislative revision. Thus, it is most appropriate that Rehberg's last survey article, published in 1998, noted in that year the implementation of the Georgia "Revised Probate Code of 1998."⁵

Nor was his influence limited to the legislature. For example, in deciding an abstruse point of probate law involving...