faculty news
faculty farewell
BY MINDIE PAGET
After a combined 81 years of service, Coggins and Meyer retire from teaching Find more photos of Coggins and Meyer, as well as the text of poems read at the retirement dinner at www.law.ku.edu/fall10
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t’s no exaggeration to say that KU Law lost two founding fathers last spring when George Coggins and Keith Meyer retired.
Both men are widely identified as creators of the fields in which they researched, published and taught for a combined 81 years. Meyer is a respected guru in agricultural law. Coggins literally wrote the book on public natural resources law. And they both left lasting impressions on their students and colleagues with idiosyncrasies that endeared, impressed and – occasionally – intimidated. Coggins’ students famously printed T-shirts featuring his hirsute face and two of his favorite questions: “Is it fair?” and “So what?” The law school bid Meyer and Coggins an official farewell during a retirement dinner on May 14 at the Adams Alumni Center. Speakers set the scene for the tumultuous, singular time during which the two joined the KU Law faculty – Meyer in 1969 and Coggins in 1970. In one of his first experiences teaching wills and trusts, Meyer asked a student a Socratic question about the construction of a certain clause in a will. “The student answered with a question of his own,” said Barkley Clark, who joined the KU Law faculty the same year as Meyer and is now a partner at Stinson Morrison Hecker Keither Meyer: Then
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in Washington, D.C. “‘Professor Meyer, tell me what is the relevance of wills and trusts to the unjust war that we are now waging in Vietnam?’”
Keith Meyer
Meyer didn’t teach wills and trusts for long, but he put in several years of service with Paul Wilson on the Defender Project, guiding and placing students in criminal defense work. He also stood in one evening as a Green Hall security
“He’s a great teacher with remarkable commitment to his students.” guard. In the wake of the Kansas Union fire and the deaths of two people on or near campus, Meyer and Clark were commissioned to protect the law school from any would-be destroyers. “We took sleeping bags and spent the night there as the entire city of Lawrence was under its first curfew since Quantrill,” Clark recalled. They poked their heads out of the front doors and saw the barrel of a rifle and a National Guardsman who told them sternly to get back inside. “Keith was troubled. So was I. We got back inside real quick.” The sudden, tragic death of Meyer’s father sent him back home to Iowa to handle matters related to the family farm. He soon discovered how little his family lawyers understood the legal issues that concerned the modern-day farmer. He returned to Lawrence with a new mission and quickly And now
