Dayton Docket

The whispers about a law school opening at the University of Dayton had been audible for years, but really started to increase in volume in the early 1970s.

UD had once run a law school. It opened in 1922 as a night school and had a fantastic record of its graduates passing the bar exam. In all it produced 173 graduates but closed in 1935 because of financial difficulties related to the Great Depression. The intention had always been to reopen the law school in better times. Now, nearly 40 years after the law school’s closure, Dayton had become the largest metropolitan area in Ohio without a law school, and the demand for more attorneys was only growing.

But it took a chance meeting to really set things in motion, when the University’s provost at the time, Father Charles Lees was approached by someone from another law school about partnering with UD on a branch campus of their law school in Dayton.

“This fell through, but it did set me thinking.” Lees later told Ralph Vines in an interview. “I began to look at statistics about law schools and students.”

That led to the formation of a committee in 1973 to look at what it would take for the University to reopen the law school.

Federal Judge Walter Rice was part of that committee.

“We readily came to the conclusion that if there was going to be another law school in this part of the state, it could only be here,” Rice says. “That wasn’t contentious. There was very little if any dissent.”

The committee came back with a recommendation of reopening the law school in the fall of 1974, but felt $1.1 million would have to be raised to cover the start-up costs for things like books to fill the law school’s library.

That’s where Virginia Kettering Kampf comes in. Kampf agreed to donate $500,000 from the Kettering Fund toward reopening the law school, saying about the effort to raise enough money, “A million dollars doesn’t sound exorbitant when one considers all the social implications.”

With Kampf’s gift and others, the law school met its fund-raising goal and reopened on August 26, 1974 on the ground floor of the University’s library. Professor Dennis Turner taught the first class that day at 9 a.m. in the law school’s only classroom.

Professor Turner was one of six faculty members hired for that first year by UD Law. He was a referee, a position which later became known as a magistrate judge, with the Montgomery County courts and had taught a few classes in UD’s business school. He was approached about being a full-time professor in the law school by Dr. Barth Snyder. Snyder, who taught in UD’s business school, was a 1934 graduate of the first iteration of UD Law and one of the people who pushed for the law school’s reopening. 

“He asked me if I would like to be a professor and I thought well why not,” Turner says. “I’ll give it a try. I did enjoy teaching.” 

The first class had 161 full-time students, who were chosen out of the more than 1,300 who applied. According to a history of the law school, half were married and 56 came from out-of-state to attend.

“The students were really engaged because so many had wanted to go to law school but never had the opportunity,” Turner says of those early classes. “They were older and more mature. They took a real interest in running the law school. They had a big investment in the school and wanted to be a part of its success.”

One of those students was Terry Miller ’77 who decided to go to law school after being a newspaper reporter.

“The moment of truth was one of the things I did as a reporter, covering court cases,” Miller says. “I was fascinated by how all that went. I thought I could probably do this. That was the initiating factor.”

Miller quickly took to law school, and ended up being among the three students along with Dalma Grandjean ’77 and Barbara Gorman ’77 who graduated summa cum laude.

“After having worked for a while, you relish the fact you’re back in education and you probably appreciate it a bit more,” Miller says.

Miller, who went on to become International General Counsel at Goldman Sachs and was General Counsel of the London 2012 Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, remembers the togetherness of that first class.

“There was a fantastic spirit,” Miller says. “We were a small class. We had come from all sorts of different places. We were mature students in the sense we had done other stuff.”

The camaraderie of those early students set the tone for all those who have come after.

“One of the best things about this law school is its family culture,” Rice says. “The school really wants students to succeed. The seeds for that were planted with the first class.”

Norman George, who was one of the first six professors at the law school and served as acting dean until the first dean, Richard Braun, could be hired in July 1974, said of the law school in a 2017 interview, “There was a lot to do, but we made the right moves. I think we got it off the ground pretty well.”

Snyder got to see his dream of a reopened law school become a reality before dying of cancer in March 1976. Snyder’s son, John, says his father taught at the law school up until a few weeks before his death.

“I think his love of the law school and love of teaching is what kept him going longer than he otherwise would have,” John says. “He was thrilled to be part of the law school and spearhead the movement to get it going again.”

Judge Rice says one of the key early decisions was to make Braun the first dean. At the time he was the dean at University of Detroit Law School. Braun had the task of getting the law school approved by not only the American Bar Association but also accepted by lawyers in the Dayton Bar. 

“There was skepticism and even outright hostility by members of the bar who felt the last thing they needed was a whole group of new lawyers each year coming in and practicing,” Rice says. “By the force of his personality and his sense of humor, by the time the first class graduated in 1977 Dean Braun had won over most members of the bar.”

The law school continued to increase in size as each new class started, quickly outgrowing the library’s lower floor.

“Our space just wasn’t adequate for two classes,” Dean Braun told Dayton Daily News writer Jim Nichols. “Students had to go wherever they could find space in the University.”

But that changed in 1978 when the law school moved from the library to Albert Emanuel Hall, where it was housed until Joseph Keller Hall was opened in 1997.

In all, 106 students from the first class graduated in 1977. The bar passage rate in Ohio for the first class was 93%.

Gorman, who went on to work in the Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office before serving 33 years as a judge at the Montgomery County Common Pleas Court, says the school’s start-up status made for very driven students.

“I think going to UD the first couple of years was tougher than going some other place,” Gorman says. “Here everyone had to prove themselves. They worked us hard.”

By 1979 the law school had gone from 161 students and 6 full-time faculty members in its first year to 440 students and 19 faculty members. That was also the year the law school received full accreditation from the American Bar Association after being provisionally accredited since it first opened. A newspaper article at the time says the accreditation news was greeted by a two-day party.

At that point, UDSL was already making a difference in the lives of its early graduates and the people they went on to help in Dayton and other communities across the country.

“If UD had not opened, I would not have gone to law school,” says Gorman, who had been a teacher and earned a master’s in psychology before attending law school. “It’s when it opened that I began to think this is the next step. The timing was fortunate for me.”

Much has changed about UDSL since its early days in the 1970s, but one thing that has not is that the school has been guided by a mission beyond just teaching the ins and outs of law practice.

On the law school’s reopening, the University’s President at the time, Father Raymond Roesch, said, “Our interest is not merely in providing, under private auspices, opportunities for the acquisition of legal expertise, worthy though this goal may be. Rather, we see herein an exceptional opportunity to promote justice, social as well as individual - and thus to help humanize society.”