William Dennis Hawkland: A Tribute
| Author | William E. Crawford |
| Position | Professor of Law, LSU Law Center, Director, Louisiana State Law Institute |
| Pages | 991-1007 |
Page 997
James J. Bailey Professor of Law, LSU Law Center, Director, Louisiana State Law Institute.
It is my privilege to write these laudatory remarks about my good friend, colleague, and idol, Bill Hawkland. He is a man of many parts-legal scholar, legal educator and teacher, law school creator and administrator, and repository of all statistics relevant to the all- American game of baseball. He is a definitive authority in each of his fields.
Bill was born in Willmer, Minnesota on November 20, 1920. He earned his B.S. from the University of Minnesota in 1942 and LLB from there in 1947. He then received an LLM from Columbia in 1949.1
Bill has taught at the University of Tennessee, Temple University, Rutgers University, and the University of Illinois, followed by his tenure at Buffalo Law School, serving as Dean beginning in 1964. According to the history of the Buffalo Law School, his service as Dean was nothing short of spectacular with a new building in the works, enrollment problems, and the great student unrest of the 1960s to be handled. After laboring so successfully in the turmoil, the proper path was clear, so Bill returned to the University of Illinois Law School to his old position on the faculty.
The history of the Buffalo Law School records2 that:
What were Hawkland's contributions to the Buffalo Law School? He efficiently expanded the school during a period of mushrooming growth brought about by the SUNY merger. In September 1964, his first year on the job, there were 15 full-time faculty and an enrollment of 253, a staff of 4 and a library of 40,000 volumes. When Hawkland left in January Page 992 1971, the full-time faculty numbered 29, enrollment had more than doubled to 606, the staff had increased to 22, and the library had soared to 146,000 volumes. Under his direction, the Seven Year Plan was hammered out in 1964. This plan guided the school through the troubled 1960s and into the relative calm of the early 1970s. Hawkland also played a major role in pushing for a "separate building with a separate library," the sine qua non for a successful school.
It is here that I will talk about Bill Hawkland-the man, a superb human being, and doting grandfather. His lifelong work in the field of commercial law is familiar to anyone, and I do not propose a redundant reiteration of his rsum and list of publications. It is in the appendix to this article.
Rather, I should talk about Bill as I have known him since he came to the LSU Law School in 1979. I have been a very close personal friend, as well as a colleague, on his law faculty.
The LSU Law School, as we old timers know it, has had legendary deans in its history. Dean Robert L. Tullis, from 1912 to 1933 and Dean Paul M. Hebert, for whom the law center is now named, for 28 years until his death in 1978. Upon Hebert's death, the faculty reconciled itself to some successor of a more ordinary scale. Little did we realize that providence had its beneficent eye upon us and would put Minnesota Bill together with Louisiana Rosemary, as husband and wife, and thus put the train of destiny on its track to bring Bill to his ultimate work here at LSU. We are grateful for the extensive experience he had, as I have outlined above, prior to his coming to LSU, and from which he gained valuable experience to do his work here. When we chose Bill as our chancellor, there was some thought that you cannot have it all as we realized he would not know anything about France or our sacred civil law. We then thumbed through his list of publications and works only to see that he had lectured in French at Louvain-Le-Nueve in Brussels. It took Bill no time at all to become an expert in the Louisiana law in his field of commercial law. He became a regular figure in the continuing legal education circuit and overwhelmed audiences with his relentless logic and illuminating examples. His evaluations wiped out everyone on the circuit.
While the law school has always been excellent and has graduated lawyers who have succeeded very well all over the world, we had always been known as that rather provincial place down in Louisiana that still lived with Napolean's Civil Code. Bill set out to change Page 993 that. He established our Summer School in Aix-en-Provence, with a faculty exchange convention with Louvain, Louvain-Le-Neuve in Brussels. He also established the Law Center Fellows which provided a basis for inspiring alumni support for the school and gave them a voice in charting the school's development. He created the LSU Law Center Hall of Fame to recognize our graduates who have succeeded in a notable way. He established numerous professorships for the faculty. He was called upon by Governor Roemer to adapt U.C.C. Article 9 to Louisiana law to improve the ease of financial dealings between Louisiana and the other states. He did this single- handedly, though with full consultation of his colleagues to make U.C.C. Article 9 fit as nearly as possible with any existing Louisiana law that was not completely incompatible with U.C.C. Article 9. That work served the state extremely well until the current version of U.C.C. Article 9 was recently adopted in Louisiana with some modifications. Bill had a very strong hand in doing the second work as well.
During his entire tenure as chancellor, the state, and higher education suffered extreme financial hardship, but Bill continued building and improving the school with nothing short of financial wizardry. He led the faculty by example, setting high standards in forming the curriculum and in the devotion of the faculty to its duties in teaching and publishing.
His nationwide fame both as a legendary authority in commercial law, legal educator, and administrator was a light that could not be concealed, even under the bushel basket of so called Louisiana provincialism. The best illustration of this was the reception the LSU recruiting team enjoyed when it went to the faculty market in Chicago to interview prospective candidates. In our pre-Hawkland days, despite our very best efforts, the line of interviewees was skimpy, to say the least. Post-Hawkland, after his presence here was known, there was standing room only among those waiting to interview for LSU.
His eminence as an international commercial law scholar along with his many other works, earned him the recognition of the Boyd Professor of Law here at LSU, the highest academic distinction of the university. Recently, in his home state, the Minnesota Law School awarded him the honorary Doctor of Laws.
But the most revealing circumstances showing Bill as a person lie outside his rsum and academic history. Probably the most appropriate single word to define Bill is to say that he was selfless in all his endeavors. All of his work was to advance the fortunes of the school, the faculty, and our graduates.
When Bill looked over the scene as he arrived here, he observed that first of all, the school, its faculty, its students, and its graduates Page 994 were of such quality that we should...
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