Dallin H. Oaks, ’57, and Rex Lee, ’63, Spotlighted for Work Building BYU Law School
BYU Law School is ranked in the top 25. 50 years ago, it struggled to recruit a faculty
The search for a new president for Brigham Young University in 1971 led a member of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU, to interview a highly regarded professor from the prestigious University of Chicago law school.
The opening in the BYU president’s chair coincided with the announcement that the church’s flagship university would start a law school.
President Harold B. Lee asked the law professor what he thought about that decision.
It was a bad idea, the presidential candidate said. But President Dallin H. Oaks got the BYU job. And he also inherited the legitimate problems he’d seen in launching a law school.
“I was not in favor of the law school because as an experienced legal educator, I was realistic about what it would take to have a first-class law school,” says President Oaks, who now holds the exact same position today that President Lee did then — first counselor in the First Presidency and vice chair of the BYU board of trustees.
“I knew that the church couldn’t afford to have a law school unless it was first rate, and I was skeptical that we could do it,” he says, in an extended interview with the Deseret News.
There was the problem of hiring the faculty, finding a dean, recruiting students, acquiring a law library and achieving accreditation.
President Oaks and his associates overcame all these hurdles and more to make BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School a precocious member of the top 25 in the latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. Most top law schools were founded in the 1800s, and, in fact, all but two of the report’s top 28 schools were founded before 1910 — UCLA in 1949 and BYU in 1973.
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“I was particularly skeptical about the critical mass of faculty that it would take to teach the first class,” he says. “I had to think about accreditation, and the key to that was, who’s going to be on the faculty? Who is the dean? And I couldn’t think of anybody I could recommend as first dean except Carl Hawkins, an experienced, highly respected former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk at the University of Michigan, but I thought the chances of getting him to leave Michigan to be dean of a new law school were negligible.”
His best realistic possibility was young Rex Lee.
Lee had been BYU’s student body president when President Oaks, then a practicing attorney in Illinois, returned to Provo at the behest of his alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School, to recruit students. President Oaks met Lee for the first time during the trip and convinced him to enroll at Chicago.
They came to know each other well. President Oaks was a Latter-day Saint stake president in the area and soon called Lee as stake Sunday school president. President Oaks then joined the Chicago Law faculty in Lee’s third year and had him as a student. Lee finished first in his class at Chicago, and President Oaks personally took him back to Washington, D.C., to introduce Lee to his friend, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, and other justices in search of a clerkship.
Read more at Deseret News