Faculty Farewell

from KU Law Magazine | Fall 2010

by University of Kansas School of Law

Faculty Farewell

After a combined 81 years of service, Coggins and Meyer retire from teaching

It’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 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 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 became one of the nation’s foremost experts on what Clark jokingly referred to as “moo-moo” and “oink-oink” law.

Over his career, Meyer has served as president of the American Agricultural Law Association, chair of the Association of American Law Schools Committee on Agricultural Law and editor in chief of the Journal of Agricultural Taxation and Law. He has testified before Congress on issues related to agriculture. And he has taught or mentored many agricultural lawyers, teachers and scholars.

He and Clark traveled the country over several years co-teaching a series of programs on the intersection of agricultural and commercial law.

“I now know why his 41 years of students venerate him so,” Clark said. “He’s a great teacher with remarkable commitment to his students.”

George Coggins

Despite his hard-earned curmudgeon persona, the same can be said of George Coggins. His long-time friend and colleague Mike Davis described him as “demanding, impatient, suffering fools poorly.”

Yet, “all of his colleagues on the faculty, all of the staff at the law school and most of the students figured out the inner teddy bear that is the real George long, long ago,” Davis said.

Coggins joined the KU faculty in 1970 and, early on, taught courses in civil procedure, administrative law and trial tactics. He soon became president of the Lawrence Sierra Club, joined the Topeka-Kansas City Air Pollution Research Group and began publishing journal articles on environmental law.

He became involved in efforts to create a tallgrass national park in Kansas and developed an interest in the various classifications of federal lands. “I began to see that there’s a whole lot more to it than oil and gas,” Coggins said.

As a trustee of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, Coggins helped organize a 1979 seminar with natural resources law professors from across the country. There he met Charles Wilkins, who would be the co-author of his revolutionary casebook, “Public Natural Resources Law,” first published in 1980 and now in its 7th edition.

“Before that, there were a couple of casebooks stemming from the ’50s, which were concerned only with oil, gas, hard-rock minerals and water,” Coggins said. “We added a bunch of layers to that, including history, constitutional provisions, wildlife, range, timber, recreation and preservation. And we treated them all as coequal resources, and that approach has become the standard since.”

Ten years later, Coggins co-authored a treatise with former KU Law Professor Rob Glicksman that has become the bible for public land and resources attorneys.

Through all his years of prodigious output, Coggins shunned technology and wrote thousands of pages of books and articles by hand. The law school’s support staff, who typed the pieces for publication, can attest to that.

And when Coggins finally turned on his computer just before retirement, he had more than 15,000 e-mails in his inbox.