The search for a new president for Brigham Young University in 1971 led a member of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU, to interview a highly regarded professor from the prestigious University of Chicago law school.
The opening in the BYU president’s chair coincided with the announcement that the church’s flagship university would start a law school.
President Harold B. Lee asked the law professor what he thought about that decision.
It was a bad idea, the presidential candidate said. But President Dallin H. Oaks got the BYU job. And he also inherited the legitimate problems he’d seen in launching a law school.
“I was not in favor of the law school because as an experienced legal educator, I was realistic about what it would take to have a first-class law school,” says President Oaks, who now holds the exact same position today that President Lee did then — first counselor in the First Presidency and vice chair of the BYU board of trustees.
“I knew that the church couldn’t afford to have a law school unless it was first rate, and I was skeptical that we could do it,” he says, in an extended interview with the Deseret News.
There was the problem of hiring the faculty, finding a dean, recruiting students, acquiring a law library and achieving accreditation.
President Oaks and his associates overcame all these hurdles and more to make BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School a precocious member of the top 25 in the latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. Most top law schools were founded in the 1800s, and, in fact, all but two of the report’s top 28 schools were founded before 1910 — UCLA in 1949 and BYU in 1973.
“Think of what we faced with (the first-year) class,” President Oaks says. “We had to recruit a class of students who could go to any law school. That was fundamental, but we had to say to the law students, ‘We’re not an accredited law school. We don’t yet have a faculty, and without accreditation we can’t guarantee that you can sit for the bar examination in any state in the United States.’
“That I saw as a major problem.”
Yet that class of 159 students helped BYU become immediately competitive. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger selected the top student in that first class as one of his clerks, the first of 16 BYU students to clerk at the nation’s highest court. This fall, the 16th, James Lee, a 2021 graduate and Rex Lee’s grandson, is clerking for Justice Samuel Alito.
“They took a lot of risks,” one of those first BYU students, Scott Cameron, says about the founders of the BYU law school. “They also appealed to people who were willing to take risks.”
BYU Law today is recognized as a global leader in religious liberty law. Earlier this month, the school’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies hosted 180 legal scholars, diplomats, judges and government and religious leaders from over 65 countries at its 30th Annual International Law and Religion Symposium.
On Friday, faculty, students and notable alumni — including Utah Sen. Mike Lee — gathered to reflect on the law school’s 50 years. A law school choir, aptly named Habeas Chorus, performed the song “The Impossible Dream,” a nod to the law school’s improbable rise.
D. Carolina Núñez, an associate dean at the law school, and a graduate, expressed feeling like she was surrounded by family: “BYU law is my alma mater. I feel like I’ve grown up here. ... This is my community, and as I look out over you I feel like this is my family.”
“The 50th anniversary is a moment for us to celebrate what so many have accomplished,” says the school’s new dean, David Moore, himself a BYU Law grad and former Alito clerk. “It’s remarkable that BYU in 50 years has become one of the top law schools not only in the United States, but globally.”
It’s also a time to look ahead to the next 50 years.
Resolving the founding concerns
Building a first-rate law school from scratch decades behind the others in that category was a monumental task, so it was fortunate BYU had President Oaks as its new leader. He’d been the acting dean of the University of Chicago’s law school, an elected member of the faculty senate, and a former law clerk to no less than the chief justice U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren, among other qualifications.
As a young university president, he gave “an inordinate” amount of time to getting the law school started because, he says, “I knew how to do it. People worked for me that knew how to do the other things, but they didn’t know how to do that.”
He knew the formula for a new law school included money, accreditation, a dean, a faculty, a library, a building and that first class of students, but not necessarily in that order.
“With the support of President Lee and President Marion G. Romney, and with the desire of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to have a first-class law school, I had no trouble getting the money I needed,” he says. “With the money up front, I could go out and get a library, if I had a librarian.”
He hired David Thomas, a recent Duke University law graduate.
“He was given all the money he needed,” President Oaks says. “And he just went across the country and bought all the books. By the time we started the law school, we had a better library than any but the really old law schools.”
Constructing a law building would take time, so BYU staff leased the old St. Francis of Assisi school in Provo from the Catholic Church.
The first-year law students soon dubbed it “St. Reubens,” President Oaks says.
The rest was more difficult.
“I was particularly skeptical about the critical mass of faculty that it would take to teach the first class,” he says. “I had to think about accreditation, and the key to that was, who’s going to be on the faculty? Who is the dean? And I couldn’t think of anybody I could recommend as first dean except Carl Hawkins, an experienced, highly respected former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk at the University of Michigan, but I thought the chances of getting him to leave Michigan to be dean of a new law school were negligible.”
His best realistic possibility was young Rex Lee.
Lee had been BYU’s student body president when President Oaks, then a practicing attorney in Illinois, returned to Provo at the behest of his alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School, to recruit students. President Oaks met Lee for the first time during the trip and convinced him to enroll at Chicago.
They came to know each other well. President Oaks was counselor in a Latter-day Saint stake presidency in the area when Lee was called as stake Sunday school president. President Oaks then joined the Chicago Law faculty in Lee’s third year and had him as a student. Lee finished first in his class at Chicago, and President Oaks personally took him back to Washington, D.C., to introduce Lee to his friend, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, and other justices in search of a clerkship.
Warren wanted Lee, but deferred to Justice Byron “Whizzer” White from Colorado, who badly wanted a clerk from the West.
With Hawkins entrenched at Michigan, “I looked on Rex as my best prospect,” President Oaks said.
Rex Lee and Carl Hawkins
The search committee concurred with President Oaks’ recommendation, and Lee — then practicing law in Arizona — accepted the role as BYU’s first dean.
“Rex Lee is an extraordinarily talented young man,” White said at the time. “I am delighted he has assumed this important task at Brigham Young.”
Still, Lee didn’t have any administrative experience at a law school and had only taught at a law school part time.
“I salute the way that was handled by the leadership of the church on that search committee,” says Elder Bruce C. Hafen, who was President Oaks’ assistant and would be the BYU Law dean from 1985-89 and is an emeritus General Authority Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ. “At the time they made their choice, they didn’t have the evidence of what he would do after he became dean. After his appointment as the dean, Rex became an Assistant U.S. Attorney General and the U.S. Solicitor General. He was probably the premier Supreme Court advocate in the United States. But all that came after he was the dean. That’s often the way spiritual impressions work.”
“There are particular people who I think were critical to the founding,” says Moore, the latest successor as dean of the law school. “I think Rex Lee is one of those. When I was at the Supreme Court, I remember having lunch with Justice (David) Souter with other clerks, and he mentioned that every generation-and-a-half or so, a truly great advocate comes along, and that the last one was Rex Lee.”
Souter once said Lee was the best lawyer he ever heard plead a case.
Lee eventually argued 59 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 23 of 30 he argued while acting as U.S. solicitor general from 1981-85.
“I think Rex Lee’s standing in the legal community has done more for the law school than most people at BYU will ever be aware of,” Moore says. “I think he opened doors immediately for our students to clerk at the Supreme Court and to work at top law firms. The runway was quite short for BYU grads to place in top legal positions.”
With Lee in place as dean, he and President Oaks began to recruit Hawkins. They failed. And then they failed again. There were in-person visits at Michigan and phone calls — all to no avail.
“Rex and I were most concerned with selecting the initial faculty,” President Oaks says. “We talked all the time about getting Carl, and tried to figure out how we could really recruit a couple of other people that we needed without Carl.”
It was slow going.
“One by one, Rex would get faculty,” says Janet Lee Chamberlain, who was Lee’s wife. “He would say, ‘Well, if you come, there’ll be you and me.”
Getting Edward Kimball was a major victory. Kimball was the son President Spencer W. Kimball, who would soon become president of the Church. Kimball had taught at both the University of Montana Law School and the University of Wisconsin Law School.
But President Oaks and Lee knew they still needed Hawkins.
“We were about a year away from starting the law school,” President Oaks says, when Hawkins surprised him with a call while he was meeting with Rex Lee and Elder Hafen.
“Carl called me to say that on fast Sunday he was fasting and praying, and the Lord told him he should accept our offer,” President Oaks said. “The Lord simply turned his no into a yes. Of course, he later became dean. I didn’t turn immediately to the men who were waiting for me to continue the meeting. I looked out the window. I looked up at the Provo Temple. It was a very emotional moment for me, because I had started off saying it was a bad idea, because I couldn’t see all this coming together.”
President Oaks then turned to look at Lee and Elder Hafen.
“Well,” he said, getting choked up, “the Lord must really want this law school because he sent us Carl.”
The first class of students
Emotion still fills Elder Hafen’s voice when he talks about that moment.
“I saw tears in his eyes,” he says of President Oaks. “The people who were really experienced in legal education knew Carl, and they felt that if the BYU Law school met his standards, then it met their standards.”
Hawkins taught torts and would succeed Lee as dean, acting as the linchpin and senior statesman of the faculty. Now three former Supreme Court law clerks with standout legal credentials would be teaching at the fledgling law school — Hawkins, Lee and President Oaks, who taught trusts and wills from 1974 to 1984 before his calling as an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ.
“I know of no law school that ever started with that background,” President Oaks says. “That’s a winning combination for a new law school. The accrediting bodies saw that, and without that, we couldn’t have been accredited so soon. And the assembling of the library and so on was impressive to them, and the obvious financial support.”
The J. Reuben Clark Law School earned accreditation a year after it opened. The last key was a student body. And President Oaks left that to Lee.
“He had incredible charisma, and that’s all on the record in his performance,” President Oaks said. “I knew that. I had experienced it. He succeeded in getting a student body a little less than two years after he was appointed. That was an incredible task, considering our class didn’t know if they were going to an accredited law school.”
Lee personally recruited and visited many of the first students.
“He was certainly hesitant,” says Chamberlain. “He never thought he would be dean of the law school, but once he got there and got into it, his enthusiasm was very contagious. It was infectious. He made prospective faculty and students feel a desire to want to be part of this groundbreaking, pioneer experience.”
The students loved Lee. He wasn’t much older than the students, and Chamberlain said many of the law students were their friends and regularly in their home.
“I was impressed with his enthusiasm,” says one such student, Elder Wilford W. Andersen, an emeritus Seventy who now lives in Gilbert, Arizona. “I also chose BYU because I knew President Oaks would be involved.”
Scott Cameron, another member of the charter class, got a new perspective on how Lee and Elder Hafen recruited students when he served as the law school’s dean of admissions for 13 years.
“It’s very interesting how creative they were,” he says. “They asked students if they knew of other qualified people who might be interested. They recruited people who hadn’t thought of or even been exposed to the idea of law school.”
That’s how Cameron was recruited. His friend, Lew Cramer, now the CEO of Colliers in Utah, told Elder Hafen about Cameron, who was teaching at Ricks College (now BYU-Idaho).
“I got a call, and they said, ‘Come down next week, take the LSAT, and if you do relatively well, you’ll be admitted.’”
They also talked to students who had done especially well as undergraduates at BYU and tried to convince them to try law school. One of those was Monte Stewart, who had been admitted to Harvard Law School with an almost perfect score on the LSAT.
“When Monte Stewart decided to go to BYU,” Cameron says, “friends of his in BYU’s Honors Program started to say, ‘Hey, this is going to be a really noble experiment. We have the chance to make something and get in on the ground floor.’”
With Hawkins and other new faculty like Edward Kimball committed, and then when Stewart, future Bonneville International President Bruce Reese and others chose BYU, more began “to commit to this wonderful new adventure,” Cameron said, “and with their optimism, there was just an amazing feeling like this was something really important.”
Stewart wasn’t the only one who could have gone to one of the nation’s top schools, says Elder Larry Echo Hawk, the former U.S. assistant secretary of Indian Affairs and emeritus General Authority Seventy who was at the University of Utah Law School when BYU Law launched.
“Many of those students in that first class would go on to have remarkable careers,” he says. “When I was teaching at the BYU law school, two of them who had become federal judges came back as adjunct faculty members, Dee Benson and Paul Warner. In the beginning, there were no guarantees, but people like that just took a chance on BYU becoming a high-quality institution, and it turned out to be that way.”
Once the first class moved into “St. Reubens,” Lee got a building-related nickname, too, recalls his son, former Utah Supreme Court Justice Thomas Lee.
When the first classes began, the name plate over the door to Rex Lee’s office was left over from the building’s Catholic days. He was delighted when a few students jokingly called him “Mother Superior.”
“We were so young,” Janet Lee Chamberlain says, “and he and the students had the kind of relationship where we were kind of all on the same level.”
The first 50 years
President Oaks says the timing for starting the law school was impeccable.
“If the law school hadn’t been founded when it was founded, I don’t see how that could ever have happened,” he says, given its specific focus on educating Latter-day Saint lawyers and subsidizing their tuition.
“The respect for the enterprise that was being launched to strengthen legal education” he says helped overcome any potential prejudice toward a predominantly Latter-day Saint law school and it achieved accreditation.
One of the hallmarks of the maturity of the BYU Law School arrived in 2010, when Reese Hansen, who had been the law school’s dean for 15 years, was elected president of the Association of American Law Schools.
“I about fell off my chair,” Elder Hafen says, “because we thought this was the group that would be the hardest to convince that we were worth having. But they knew Reese and they thought, if somebody of that quality is at that school, then that’s good enough for us. For him to become president of that organization was, to me, one of the important steps in the law school’s history of earning credibility.”
BYU Law’s inextricable religiosity also helped foster a pioneering role in international religious freedom. The International Center for Law and Religion Studies has helped write or influence religious liberty protections added to constitutions and laws around the world.
“A lot of what first drew faculty and students to BYU was a unique mission, and that continues to be the case,” Moore says. “The fact that this is the only law school in the world founded on the restored gospel of Jesus Christ attracts people to come and experience the uniqueness of BYU law. They come because they’re passionate about the law but also because they’re committed disciples of Jesus Christ.”
President Oaks, at the dedication of the law building in 1975, called for BYU Law to be a lighthouse of ethics, morality and professional responsibility. He also said “religious commitment, religious values and commitment to ethics and morality are part of the reason for this school’s existence ... .”
Those ideals were part of the classroom from the first day, says Elder Andersen.
“The law school was unique in that it taught the law but it also exemplified, in our faculty members, commitment to the Gospel, the restoration,” he says. “I won’t forget Rex Lee’s convocation, where he gave a talk and then he said, after everything I have taught you, if you forget it all, this is what I want you to remember, and he bore his testimony of the truthfulness of the restored gospel.
“The faculty had been teachers at prestigious law colleges, and they taught law as they taught it in those other law schools, but they were able to add the quality of their lives to their teaching so we knew that we could practice law and we could be successful without forfeiting any of our personal convictions and commitments to the gospel.”
The result, for the charter class and dozens of subsequent classes, was the creation of leaders in and out of the Church of Jesus Christ. And the law school itself would serve as a training ground for BYU leadership. In addition to Rex Lee, former law school dean Kevin Worthen went on to serve as president of Brigham Young University.
“The law school tried to teach us how to consider problems and how to weigh options and how to come to solid and sound conclusions in a way that keeps peace,” Elder Andersen said. “One of the roles of a lawyer is to be a peacemaker, and dispute resolution is as important in our society as anything.”
Cameron, the charter class member and former dean of admissions, says the impact on the church was remarkable.
“The skills the first class developed were transportable,” he says. “What you’re supposed to be trained to do in law school is to see both sides of an issue, to try to be reasonable, to try to either help people settle things. To use those those skills to help the kingdom grow in different places was incredible.”
More than a dozen members of the first class have served as mission presidents around the world. Monte Stewart, who was the top student in the charter class after turning down Harvard, is serving a mission now. Three charter class members have served as General Authority Seventies — Elder Andersen, Elder Stanley G. Ellis and Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge.
What should the BYU law school focus on for the next 50 years?
When President Oaks laid down expectations for the charter class of law school students 50 years ago, he declared that “the law school must always promote loyalty and understanding of the Constitution of the United States.”
“He placed a real focus on the rule of law,” Moore says. “He said the law school would be ‘an institution with an enlightened devotion to the rule of law.’”
As BYU celebrates its quinquagenary and looks ahead to the next half century, President Oaks points to a general societal erosion of support for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law as areas of emphasis for the future of the BYU law school.
“I think the law school has a mission,” he says, “to continue to train predominantly faithful Latter-day Saints to perform what the legal profession needs to perform under our divinely inspired Constitution, including supporting that Constitution.”
“I have great concern over the proportion of lawmakers and opinion leaders that say the Constitution is outdated. And implied, they say, ‘What we need is a dictator.’ That’s implied. It’s implied in who they support for public office. It’s implied in their opposition to the protections that the Constitution builds in, including separation of powers and the rule of law, which are under fire today.”
President Oaks said he believes the Constitution must be maintained through the efforts of a broad group of people.
“What we need is a lot of people who understand and support the Constitution. I used to think that if the Constitution hung by a thread — I couldn’t imagine how it would hang by thread; now I can imagine — but I used to think maybe some prominent figure that I refer to as a man on a white horse will save it. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s Latter-day Saints who support the Constitution.”
President Oaks also has praise for the law school’s contributions to religious liberty and sees progress on that front.
“Some people say, we’re slipping,” he says. “We’re slipping on a respect for religion and freedom of religion, we’re slipping by some measures, but I’m encouraged that more people see the role of freedom of religion as protecting believers but also protecting nonbelievers. And it’s an international issue, not just a U.S. issue.”
Moore is placing an emphasis on attracting students with different life experiences and emphasizing BYU’s core mission and the fundamentals of a classic legal education.
He recently welcomed BYU Law’s 51st class and mentioned the school’s ranking.
“Even among top law schools, BYU is unique,” he said. “We have a broader mission than any of those of other top law schools. We combine faith and learning. We care about your development as a lawyer and as a faithful disciple.”
In an interview weeks into his tenure, he noted the many times church leaders have called for BYU to become a great university, and how another church leader recently came to campus and said BYU will fulfill that expectation by embracing its uniqueness.
“That’s really what guides me,” Moore says. “One of my fundamental commitments is to the uniqueness of BYU. When I attended BYU and BYU law school, a significant reason was the fact that the unique mission of BYU resonated with me. I love learning. I love academics. That’s a lifelong passion but I, at my core, am a disciple of Jesus Christ and that passion drives me. BYU is a place where I could be passionate about both things fully.”
Moore has taught at University of Kentucky, George Washington and the University of Chicago and has worked on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, as a trial attorney at the Justice Department and then as general counsel and the acting deputy administrator at USAID.
He knows what he wants for believing BYU Law students, and what he wants from them.
“BYU provides a unique place, a unique home for them, a unique setting for becoming top-notch lawyers while remaining and becoming even better disciples of Jesus Christ,” he says.
To this fall’s first-year law students, he remarked, “We need people who have not abandoned faith, who have not abandoned hope, who have not abandoned idealism. We need people who can go out with that faith and idealism and pursue it with the skills that they’re developing here in law school.”
He told them he has broader ambitions for them than success in the legal field.
“We hope you will combine becoming an excellent top-notch lawyer who represents us and your clients well with also becoming a committed disciple, someone who is a leader and a problem solver, someone who has mature faith and can maintain faith and idealism and work toward those even in the face of uncertainty, gaps between the ideal and real and unanswered questions, someone who is committed to the authoritative sources of light and maintains their priorities even as you work on the highest virtue of charity, the pure love of Jesus Christ.”
BYU Supreme Court law clerks by year (year graduated):
- Monte N. Stewart 1977-1978 (1976), Chief Justice Warren E. Burger.
- Eric G. Andersen 1978-1979 (1977), Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.
- Kevin J. Worthen 1983-1984 (1982), Justice Byron White.
- Michael W. Mosman 1985-1986 (1984), Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.
- Von G. Keetch 1989-1990 (1987), Chief Justice Warren E. Burger (shared with Justice Antonin Scalia).
- Denise Posse-Blanco Lindberg 1990-1991 (1988), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
- Karl M. Tilleman 1992-1993 (1990), Justice Clarence Thomas (shared with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger).
- Stephen M. Sargent 1994-1995 (1993), Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
- Jay T. Jorgensen 1999-2000 (1997), Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
- Hannah Clayson Smith 2003-2004 (2001), Justice Clarence Thomas.
- Hannah Clayson Smith February 2006-July 2006 (2001), Justice Samuel Alito.
- Mike Lee 2006-07 (1997), Justice Samuel Alito.
- David H. Moore 2007-08 (1996), Justice Samuel Alito.
- Robert N. Stander 2014-2015 (2011), Justice Clarence Thomas.
- Stephanie Hall Barclay 2021-22 (2011), Justice Neil Gorsuch.
- James Lee 2023-present (2021), Justice Samuel Alito.