Page 12 - The First Fifty Years

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6 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

Despite, however, the promising omens just recited, the
future of A.A. White’s vision, and the history of the College of
Law he founded, would soon take a radically different direction.

Nothing Succeeds Like Successors

In the spring of 1956, A.A. White resigned suddenly in mid-
semester from the deanship of the College of Law (and from its
faculty, although he would return in 1962 and serve as interim
dean in 1974–1976). Conflicts with University of Houston
administrators, never fully enamored of White’s vision for the law
school, apparently came to a head in ways which White could no
longer tolerate. White regarded law as a noble profession and
believed that law schools should train highly qualified students to
serve an increasingly complex society. He was dismayed when the
University chartered, over his opposition, a law fraternity with an
“Aryan clause” (i.e., no Jews allowed). Then, the University turned
down flat his proposal to build or rehab a downtown building to get
the College of Law out of the university library’s basement15 and
into a space capable of supporting a top-quality institution. A.A.
White’s last act as dean would be to hire another College of Law
graduate, John Neibel, to take over his classes. Neibel eventually
would build the new building that White had longed for, and White
would live long enough to see it go up.16

White had tried to build an institution, too—one that reflected
his admiration for national law schools that admitted students of
proven ability and hired professors who would teach law in its
societal context, inquiring after the social impact of laws,
considering how the legal system might serve society better, and
publishing widely. Newell Blakely, while loyal to White when White
was dean (as White would be to Blakely when he rejoined the
faculty during Blakely’s deanship), saw things differently.

Blakely, not White, was by then the College of Law’s most
respected teacher. His classroom discipline was legendary. So, too,
was the discipline of his approach to legal education. Blakely (at
least according to John Mixon, a contemporary of both) regarded
law more statically than did White, as something to be learned by
memory and induction—that is, through piecing together reasons
and principles gleaned from readings of assigned cases and
interrogations by Blakely, a master of the Socratic method.17

Dean Blakely also had firm ideas—and ideas distinctly
different from his predecessor’s—about how the College of Law
should be comprised. He installed a new system of admissions that
much resembled the philosophy of the College’s parent institution,