Dean of the University of Chicago Law School: 1975-1979
Deanship
Norval Morris succeeded Phil Neal as dean of the Law School in 1975. Morris’s main contributions lay in bolstering the strength of the Law School’s faculty and in initiating the capital campaign to revitalize the Law School’s library, intertwined efforts that helped propel the Law School forward in key ways.
In 1977, the Law School established the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professorship in Law to support scholarship related to the First Amendment. Kalven, a graduate of the Law School, had been a member of the faculty from 1945 until his death in 1974. He was a noted expert on the First Amendment as well as juries, torts, and tax law.
Morris’s most significant faculty hires included Gidon Gottlieb, Antonin Scalia, and Frank Easterbrook, each of whom contributed to the growing scholarly diversity among the faculty. Gottlieb served on the faculty from 1976 to 2003 as the Leo Spitz Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, during which time he taught courses on international law, jurisprudence, human rights, and negotiations. Scalia joined the faculty as an assistant professor of law in 1977 and served as the faculty advisor to the Law School’s chapter of the newly-founded Federalist Society, an organization for conservative and Libertarian law students. Scalia left the Law School in 1982, when he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Four years later, President Reagan appointed Scalia to the U.S. Supreme Court. Easterbrook, who had graduated from the Law School in 1973, joined the faculty in 1979. He is expert in antitrust law and criminal law and procedure. After he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1985, Easterbrook took the position of Senior Lecturer in Law, which he still holds as of 2021.
Toward the end of his time as dean, Morris kicked off the fundraising effort that would result in the dedication of the D’Angelo Law Library in 1987. Morris emphasized the importance of the library to the school’s mission when addressing alumni in 1978: “The law library is at the heart of our enterprise. The lawyer is a wordmonger, a shaper of thoughts in words – that is our craft.” (3) While many still considered the Law School’s library the best law library in the region, it was failing to keep pace with the ever-widening areas of research among the faculty. “Indeed,” Morris continued, “virtually all the faculty properly range beyond the traditional in their research and writing. Theirs is no affected, unreal, abstract, scholarship; they search in further fields so that they can better do their closely practical, serious, professional work. This must be encouraged for in the long run it is the largest pedagogic as well as academic contribution we have to make.” (9)
The additions to the faculty and the investment in expanding the library were part of the Law School’s driving ethos, in Morris’s view. In his speech, “The Law and Legal Education” commemorating the Law School’s 75th anniversary in 1977, Morris asserted that the University of Chicago Law School had earned a place at “the forefront of scholarly creativity and law reform,” by pursuing “a quite simple course of conduct: a firm adherence to the traditional values of the common law, its methods and concepts, modulated by a tolerance of scholarly experimentation and a willingness seriously to consider ideas from other disciplines and from other legal systems. That is, I believe, the core of our heritage. It is a goodly heritage; it will serve us well in the future.” (10)
[All quotes taken from the folder “U of C Law School Speeches” in: Norval Morris, Papers., Box 5, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.]
