Page 11 - The First Fifty Years

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DRIVEN 5

Dean White apparently operated on a short leash. On the
one hand, he set high standards. Other Texas law schools
required 90 college hours and a C average for admission. White
stipulated the same hours but a C+ average, making the
requirements of his fledgling College of Law the most rigorous in
the state. On the other hand, White acquiesced in the need to
create an evening division of the law school, staffed by part-time
professors from the local bar, to bring in additional income.10

Dean White set out to lay a firm foundation for the school
by hiring top-notch faculty. White’s first hire, signaling his
intentions, was Lewis Roberts, a University of Kentucky Law
School faculty retiree with a Ph.D. and a national reputation
as a legal scholar. Other early additions included Dwight Olds,
poached from Wake Forest Law School, who soon would hold
the record for most frequent publication during the first
decade of HLR’s existence; C.W. Wellen, a Harvard LL.M.
student referred to White by Harvard Dean Erwin Griswold;
and David Vernon, a Harvard LL.B. with an S.J.D. from New
York University. Vernon departed after a year and went on to
a distinguished career in legal academia, including the
deanship at Iowa. But his credentials, however shortly they
may have graced the University of Houston College of Law,
were emblematic of the caliber of the faculty A.A. White
sought to achieve.11

Indeed, of the College’s first nine faculty hires, more than
half held J.D.s from such non-Texas law schools as Harvard,
Michigan, and Chicago,12 and all but one had, or would shortly
obtain, graduate study outside the state, capped by such
advanced degrees as LL.M., Ph.D., and S.J.D.13

Two homegrown Texas products, however, would go on to be
central players in the history of the College of Law: Newell
Blakely, a UT grad rescued by White from two years of law
practice in Harlingen, Texas, who would become a beloved
teacher and White’s successor as dean (although, ironically, his
vision of a great law school differed sharply from White’s); and
John Mixon, the first University of Houston College of Law
graduate to be hired as a professor at his alma mater when
Vernon’s resignation left a sudden hole in the teaching ranks—
who would himself become beloved by literally generations of
students, remain on the faculty for 55 years, and leave behind
him, among his many other good works, the history of the law
school from which (as the endnotes reveal) much of the material
in the present section of this essay has been lifted with its
author’s blessing.14