Page 127 - The First Fifty Years

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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 121

secured funding from the Frankel Family Foundation for the first
lecture. In HLR’s Ground Floor offices,30 there was surprise and
relief. Because of the wholly unexpected underwriting of the first
lecture by the Frankel Foundation, and with some hope that a
reciprocally generous gesture up-front would not pay off as poorly
as had the naming of the new College of Law building in earlier
years,31 the Review immediately dubbed the proposed multi-year
project “The Frankel Lecture Series.”

With funding in place, HLR then set about identifying a
keynote speaker for the first lecture. Board 32 formed a
committee of law school faculty members to discuss possible
speakers and, on their recommendation, selected Dean Joel
Seligman of the University of Arizona College of Law, a personal
friend of Professor Robert Ragazzo and arguably the nation’s
foremost scholar in securities law. When contacted, Dean
Seligman was intrigued enough to accept at once. With
Seligman’s assistance, the Review then lined up two additional
top academics and an advisor to the Securities and Exchange
Commission32 to serve as commentators for the lecture.

With Board 33, headed by D’Andra Millsap (now Millsap
Shu), coordinating all of the logistics,33 the Inaugural Frankel
Lecture proved to be an enormous success. The entire event—
from the dinner in Dean Seligman’s honor hosted the night
before the lecture, to the lecture itself and the papers published
in HLR’s first Frankel Lecture issue—exceeded the Review’s
highest expectations.34

The meticulous preparation devoted to the lecture, and the
genial fondness of the first lecturer for those who had made it
possible, were captured in Dean Seligman’s remarks, recounting
the process of selecting his entrée, at the dinner:

Week before the lecture, phone rings. I pick up.
Ms. Millsap [now Shu]: “Dean Seligman, would you like
chicken or fish for dinner?”
[Seligman]: “Fish.”

Next day, phone rings again. I pick up:
[Shu]: “Dean, would you like Snapper or Red Fish?”
[Seligman]: “Snapper.”

Next day, phone rings a third time. I pick up:
[Shu]: “Blackened or oven-roasted?”
[Seligman]: “I’ll just take a cheeseburger.”35

D’Andra Shu recalls today, a decade and more after the
dinner and lecture: “My flush was a mixture of embarrassment