F E AT U R E
STETSON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW:
A History of Innovation, Tenacity, and Achievement. BY TOM DANIEL
J
ust like a person, an institution often has its own personality, a set of character traits that define it. At Stetson University College of Law, this personality is distinct. Stetson Law is dynamic and innovative. For more than 120 years, it has been a pioneer, always looking for new challenges and opportunities, as well as creative ways to address them. Above all, Stetson Law is resilient and compassionate.
Photo credit: Emily Preu
Stetson Law Firsts Stetson Law’s history as an innovator began with its founding. After repeated requests from members of The Florida Bar, the College of Law opened in 1900 in DeLand, becoming Florida’s first law school. Innovation also took shape in terms of inclusivity when in 1908, Mary Stewart Howarth-Hewitt attended Stetson and became the first woman in Florida to attend law school and earn a law degree. In their definitive book, “Florida’s First Law School, History of Stetson University College of Law,” the authors, Michael I. Swygert and W. Gary Vause, write, “… since its inception, Stetson University’s College of Law offered not only substantive, theoretical instruction in the law, it also required students to take an intensive skills course in trial practice. Its program was both comprehensive and innovative, a combination which, at the time, appears to have been unique in American legal education.”
Tenacious Throughout History From the start, Stetson Law was forward-thinking. However, history often presented the school with unanticipated challenges. During the Great Depression, approximately 1,500 institutions of higher education in the country went bankrupt or were forced to shut down. The Florida state economy was in shambles, yet
The Public Defender Clinic in 1969. Robert E. Jagger, together with Stetson Professor Paul Barnard and 6th Judicial Circuit Senior Judge John Bird, organized the state’s first clinical legal education program at Stetson in 1963.
Stetson Law survived. Dean Lewis H. Tribble kept the school afloat by convincing teachers to remain at Stetson beyond their retirement and work for a lower salary. In the next decade, the school had to cope with a challenge it could not overcome – World War II. Facing economic challenges and a shortage of young men applying for the school because of the lowering of the draft age to 18, Stetson Law was shuttered from 1943 to 1946. At the war’s end, the Stetson Board of Trustees made Stetson University President the decision that it was time to reopen. William Sims Allen and his secretary. In his announcement, then-President William Sims Allen said, “We are determined to have a law school of even greater distinction than past years.” Thus began a period of steady growth and achievement. Less than a decade later, in 1954, Stetson Law moved to its current location. University officials realized that to attract more students, present them with the opportunities that other law schools offered, and achieve the status the school desired, Stetson Law needed to move to a metropolitan community. Once word got out, three cities – Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, and Tampa – competed to be chosen as the new home. The winner was St. Petersburg, offering to pay
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Students study in the Law Library in 1903.
