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Welcome Message from the President
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The Assault Begins
A week after dean Donald Gordon’s letter to Chief Justice Kavanagh asking the court to take up Gordon’s complaints about me and Cooley Law School, Justice Charles Levin sent the chief justice an eleven page memorandum he had received from Gordon on June 25th. He also sent a copy to me.
The memorandum was unsigned, probably because its author, presumably a lawyer, was aware of its libelous content.
The memorandum begins with the false and defamatory statement that Cooley Law School is a proprietary enterprise. The document recites in great detail the work of the committee of scholars in reviewing the articles of incorporation filed by Cooley’s incorporators. So much so, that it is hard to conceive that its author was anyone other than a member of that committee.
Certainly whoever wrote it had to know that Cooley is a non profit corporation. The author unquestionably knew that the characterization of the school as proprietary was untrue.
Which suggests this follow up question: Why would a lawyer deliberately misrepresent Cooley as a proprietary school? Why would he lie about a thing like that?
One has only to reach the eighth page of the memorandum to see where the author was going with his malicious falsehood. He attempts to insinuate that everything I did in the founding of Cooley Law School was in furtherance of a scheme to make money. He snidely infers or blatantly asserts that I used my position as a supreme court justice to coerce the board of education and the board of law examiners to approve the school as a means of lining my pockets with ill gotten gain.
I make no apology for the fact that I, as a justice of the supreme court, lent a certain aura of legitimacy to the effort to start a law school. Certainly I had credibility as a jurist that a businessman not associated with the law would not be able to claim. Certainly there was, or should have been, a presumption that what I was trying to do was motivated by a desire to advance the public interest, rather than seeking selfish profit. And properly so. Accurately so.
There was an ironic twist to Dean Gordon’s broadside. At that time he was about to move to Hawaii to become the first dean of a new law school at the University of Hawaii. That law school was, to use the sullying phrase of his unsigned memorandum, the “brain-child” of William Peterson, Chief Justice of Hawaii. I had met Bill Peterson at Valley Forge during a Freedom Foundation competition judging, and he told me some of the difficulties and challenges he faced. Fortunately for him, Hawaii had no other law schools with deans ready to defend their monopoly on legal education. Not only did he escape being maligned for his efforts, he was in fact universally praised. Today, the law school at the University of Hawaii is known as the William Peterson School of Law.
The allegation that I used my position as a supreme court justice to coerce lawyers into donating to Cooley is ludicrous. The founders banquet was promoted by means of a general mailing to the members of the bar of Michigan and various other business leaders, of a formal invitation. That invitation recited that “The Board of Directors and the Founders Society of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School cordially invite you.. etc.” I am listed as the President of the school. The honorary Chairmen of the Founders Society included United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Governor William G. Milliken, and Howard H. Kehrl, general Manager of the Oldsmobile Division of General Motors Corporation. The General Chairman was Phillip Marco. Lieutenant Governor James H. Brickley and East Lansing lawyer Jack Cote` were co-chairs. I was not a member of the 51 person committee, which bore the names of eleven other judges, including Thomas G. Kavanagh of the Michigan supreme court.
The canons of judicial ethics do not prohibit participation by judges in general appeals for charity. It’s a common and an appropriate thing for judges to do. There is no appearance of impropriety when judges lend their names to mass mailings. It is not the same thing as a judge calling up a lawyer or litigant and asking him or her directly to contribute to a cause. Only personal solicitations are prohibited. I have no doubt that the distinguished legal educator who drafted that scurrilous memorandum knew perfectly well that the accusation of improper conduct was false.
No doubt the goal of the attack from Wayne State was the same as the purpose of the gentlemanly prod from the University of Michigan’s Ted St. Antoine; to spike the establishment of Cooley Law School. But the tactics emanating from Detroit were different from those which came from Ann Arbor. Unable to rouse opposition to the law school on issues of educational quality, our enemy was turning to personal vilification. Bring down the man and you will bring down the school.
Or so they thought.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004