Skip to main content

Dayton Docket

Bringing The Law To Life

Charlie Hallinan sat down in his first ever law class not knowing what to expect. He just knew he wanted something different.

“There were a couple of people I knew who’d gone to law school,” says Hallinan, who had been working as a program planner for a Community Action Agency. “I thought, well, I’ll try that.”

By the end of that first class, Hallinan had discovered a passion for the law that persists to this day.

“The very first class, it was a hoot,” Hallinan says. “My immediate reaction was how come no one told me about this. Reading the cases and imaging the people and the intellectual challenge of it, it was what I was born to do, I thought.”

Now after more than three decades of trying to spark that same fascination with the law in his students, Hallinan is retiring from the University of Dayton School of Law.

Hallinan started at UDSL in 1983 after getting his LL.M. degree from Yale. Before that he’d spent three years in private practice and two years as a clerk for a federal judge in Toledo, where he went to law school.

Hallinan had ties to the University of Dayton, having gotten his undergraduate degree here.

“I came because it seemed like a good place to work and it turned out to be a good place to work,” Hallinan says.

Hallinan says he’s enjoyed the many students he’s taught over the years, even if they didn’t always appreciate him at first.

“People have found me frustrating as a teacher because I’m the kind of professor who answers a question with a question,” Hallinan says. “If you ask me what time it is, I start inquiring about, ‘How would you figure out what time it was?’ But there were people for whom it clicked. For me the core of what it means to be a good lawyer is to be interested in figuring things out.”

Hallinan has a knack for bringing the law to life for students, something that stands out when it comes to courses like what used to be called the, “Law of Negotiable Instruments” and is now the “Law of Payment Systems.”

“The core of it historically was this self-contained, very formal intellectual puzzle,” Hallinan says. “That’s dry. Something as technical and formal as to whether this thing is a negotiable instrument.”

“On another level you have an 85-year-old widow in rural Mississippi who was conned into buying aluminum siding by some fly-by-night company and the answer to that question will decide whether she gets to keep her house.”

For Hallinan, the beauty of law is in the details and what you can do with them.

“A lawyer’s job is mastering those technical things in order to accomplish something in the real world that works to the benefit of people,” Hallinan says.

While Hallinan takes the law seriously, he’s never taken himself too seriously.

One night it almost ended up putting him on the wrong side of the law.

Hallinan, his kids and some of their friends used to see how far they could fly paper airplanes from the fourth floor balcony of Keller Hall.

“One night we were here doing that and somebody in the library was concerned there were kids running around making noise, so they called campus police,” Hallinan says. “Mary, my wife, was kind enough to deal with them and told them that we’d desist.”

In retirement, Hallinan says he plans to travel, continue volunteering with English for Speakers of Other Languages and do some genealogy work.

As he leaves UDSL, he’ll take with him the wonderful memories of his time spent here and the trademark coffee mug he was rarely spotted without. At least one class even bought him a special one as a gift.

The mug did more than hold coffee through the years. It was used to help many a student understand important legal concepts.

“If I needed an off-the-cuff hypothetical, inevitably it would involve buying the mug, selling the mug, granting security interest in the mug, lending the mug to somebody and not getting it back,” Hallinan says.

Now Hallinan can talk about retiring the mug.

But not before imparting to his students that same love of the law he discovered in his first law class all those years ago.

“It was fun,” Hallinan says of his time teaching, “and in my universe of values that’s high. Seeing the light go on is really satisfying.”

Previous Post

How To Make Your Summer One To Never Forget

A new partnership will offer law students the summer experience of a lifetime.
Read More
Next Post

The Best Job In The World

Retiring Professor Jim Durham talks about what he'll take away from his time at the University of Dayton School of Law, the advice he has for those in the legal profession, and the story that's stuck with him all these years.
Read More