Cooley Howarth, a professor emeritus who taught for 37 years in the School of Law, died Nov. 8 in Covington, Ohio. He was 76.
Howarth started as a professor at the University of Dayton School of Law after he graduated from the University of Denver College of Law in 1976. UDSL had just reopened in 1974, so Howarth had an opportunity to help shape the young law school.
“It was a pleasure building a law school,” Howarth said in a video upon his retirement in 2013. “A new curriculum, a new faculty, a new building and a way of teaching law that reflected the people here in this building in a way that we thought would help make better lawyers.”
Among his contributions to the law school, Howarth founded and supervised a National Administrative Law Moot Court competition, which annually brought to Dayton nationally recognized administrative law scholars and experts. He also served as director of the legal research and writing program, founded the school's CAP CAN (Child Advocacy Program Child Abuse and Neglect) project, advised the Law Review and directed the LL.M. and M.S.L. graduate law programs in intellectual property and technology law.
Professor Emeritus Blake Watson, who worked with Howarth for more than 20 years, said Howarth served as a mentor for him and did a great job preparing students for what to expect once they were attorneys.
“Cooley taught from a practitioner's point of view,” Watson said. “In administrative law and family law, you can delve into all sorts of interesting topics and he certainly did, but he brought it back to what you would do in those subjects as a practicing lawyer.”
Watson said Howarth was known for being active in class.
“He was energetic in the classroom,” Watson said. “He would go up and down the aisles more than most of us would dare and really engage the students in that regard.”
In addition to his roles in the law school, Howarth served as a consultant on administrative procedures and processes to the governments of Ukraine and Georgia.
But what Howarth said he loved most was learning the law and helping students understand it.
“I got to do what I like to do. To learn about something that I thought was really interesting. Lots of different kinds of law,” Howarth said in the video. “And the only thing I had to do in return was to share what I learned. That’s a pretty good deal.”