May 2007

PRESENT AT THE CREATION: REFLECTIONS ON RETIRING DEAN RICHARD J. MORGAN

BY PROF. RICHARD BROWN

The William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV is prospering.  Its reputation within the state and throughout the country is strong and growing stronger.  The student body is talented and diverse, drawn from an applicant pool that now regularly exceeds 2,000.  Students are taught by a highly-regarded faculty, many members of whom were drawn from other major law schools.  The school’s extensive curriculum is enhanced by exceptional programs, including the Thomas and Mack Legal Clinic and the Lawyering Process program, as well as the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution.  The law school is housed in a beautifully remodeled facility located in the center of the UNLV campus.  The law school and the community are served by the Wiener-Rogers Law Library, the largest law library in the state. 

Given the present stature of the law school, it is easy to forget how far, and how fast, the law school developed and the enormous role that founding dean Richard Morgan played in that development.  I came with Dean Morgan from Arizona State University, along with Professor Mary Berkheiser and Associate Dean Christine Smith.  We three were lucky enough to be present at the creation and to observe close-hand the extraordinary efforts by an extraordinary man that launched the school on its rapid trajectory to excellence.

When Dick Morgan was hired away from his position as Dean of the Law School at Arizona State University in 1997 to be the dean of the William S. Boyd School of Law, there was no William S. Boyd School of Law -- no faculty, no students, no building, no library, no curriculum, no policies, no procedures.  Everything necessary to becoming a first-rate law school had to be created from scratch.  It is true, of course, that important and necessary pieces of the foundation were present.  The school was to be a part of an established state university, whose administration was strongly committed to the law school.  Similarly, there was essential support from important members of the state legislature, the bar, the judiciary, and, of crucial importance, major private donors like Bill Boyd and Jim Rogers.  But, important as these foundational blocks were, the responsibility of building a real law school rested almost exclusively on the founding dean, Dick Morgan. 

I vividly recall sitting in Dick’s living room in Tempe, Ariz. shortly after he had been appointed to the UNLV deanship.  He had asked Professor Berkheiser, Dean Smith and me to join him at UNLV, and this was our first meeting to begin thinking about the task of starting a law school.  As we sat with our conspicuously blank yellow legal pads on our laps, it dawned on us that we had no idea how to conjure a law school from thin air and that there was no manual available to guide us.  It was a frightening and humbling realization.  In fact, however, we were not really writing on a blank slate, because Dick had a clear vision of what the school would be.  His vision (and here I greatly oversimplify, because it became clear that Dick had thought broadly and deeply about the undertaking) was three-pronged.  First, the William S. Boyd School would be a truly excellent law school.  It would not be good enough for UNLV, or Las Vegas, or Nevada, to create a law school that could meet minimal accreditation standards.  Rather, this law school would be a truly first-rate law school.  Second, the law school would be Nevada’s law school, by which he meant a school that served all of Nevada and not just Las Vegas or southern Nevada.  Third, the law school would be deeply committed to providing service to the community.  Everything that the law school did:  from teaching, to scholarship, to developing programs like the clinic, to building a law library, were to be seen as means of providing real service to the state and the legal profession.  For Dick, service needed to be at the core of legal education because service lies at the very core of the legal profession.  It is perhaps the greatest tribute to Dick’s leadership that this vision is very much reflected in the mature law school that now exists.

Getting from vision to reality required the talents of a truly extraordinary leader.  Dick came to Las Vegas in the fall of 1997 with the expectation (daunting and almost unrealistically optimistic as that expectation was) that the law school would open in August of 1998.  In less than a year, a founding faculty had to be hired, a first-year curriculum developed, academic policies created, a staff assembled, a library created, and students admitted.   Dick recognized that the heart of any law school (indeed any organization) is its people, and he set out to attract accomplished teachers and staff members from around the country.  He succeeded in part because of the inherent attraction of participating in the building of a new school, but also in very large part because of his own national reputation within legal education and the strength of his vision for the school.  Prospective students were also inspired by his leadership and recognized that, despite the modest facilities and lack of accreditation, they would have a unique opportunity to participate in a grand undertaking. 

That first year was a mad scramble which must have caused Dick many sleepless nights.  Perhaps the greatest cause for worry was the physical facility.  The law school was to be housed temporarily in an aged elementary school with the encouraging but not entirely descriptive name of Paradise Elementary School.  The law school was committed to opening in August 1998, with law school sized classrooms, law faculty and staff offices, and a functioning law library, all wired for computers, none of which, of course, were present in the elementary school.  Most challenging, the Paradise school was to continue operating as an elementary school until June of 1998, giving the law school only two months to effect a complete renovation before its August opening.   It got done, with no time to spare.  We thought at the time that the law school motto should be the Latin rendering of “by the skin of our teeth.”

While these tangible steps (hiring faculty and staff, recruiting students, renovating a temporary building) were all crucial to the launching of the school, the most significant of Dick’s accomplishments in these very early years may be less tangible.  Dick was everywhere in the state, talking to judges, local bar associations, law firms, legislators, and community leaders, articulating the mission of the law school and its importance to the state.  The law school is successful today in large part because so many in the state believe (quite rightly) that a first-rate state law school is truly an asset to the state.

The success of the William S. Boyd School of Law today is due to the talent and very hard work of many people, both inside and outside the law school.  Dick would be (and usually is) the first to give primary credit for the law school’s success to others.  But in a very real sense, the quality and character of the school is the product of, and a reflection of, its extraordinary founder, Dean Richard Morgan.  The law school, the university, the legal profession, and the state have all benefited enormously from the vision and effort of an exceptional man.  And I, along with my other Arizona State colleagues, was particularly lucky to have a front row seat to view it all.

Richard Brown was founding Director of the Wiener-Rogers Law Library, as well as a full faculty member, from the UNLV-Boyd School of Law’s inception.  He continues his service to the school as a professor of law, to the delight of students studying property and trusts and estates.