Founded in 1900, Stetson University College of Law began as a private law school focused on preparing students to become ethical and competent members of the legal profession. As such, Stetson provides a challenging educational experience coupled with an awareness and appreciation for social responsibility. This goal of excellence remains constant as Stetson celebrates its centennial year. In this issue, the Stetson Law Review revisits highlights of the last 100 years to commemorate such a notable event. The pieces are arranged roughly in chronological order by the dates of the subject matter to provide the reader with a clear picture of Stetson’s transition from Florida’s first law school to one of national distinction.
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Stetson University College of Law celebrates its 100th year in 2000–2001. We enter this great celebratory year with justifiable pride in past accomplishments and great cause for optimism about the future. Never before has the Stetson law school community enjoyed so many advantages and so much favorable recognition. The College of Law is ranked among the top half of all law schools nationally, and the College of Law’s trial advocacy program has achieved unparalleled success.
Although I did not graduate from Stetson, the College of Law has been very special to me. As a young lawyer, I remember working with other members of the St. Petersburg Bar Association who tried to help Stetson relocate the College of Law to Gulfport. Dean Harold L. Sebring was a personal mentor to me, and I enjoyed being an adjunct professor at the College of Law in the early 1970s. I am from Pinellas County and used to live less than ten minutes from the campus.
I preface this Article about my father and his affiliation with Stetson University College of Law by disclosing that his career as a professor and dean began well before my birth and ended in 1939, when I was five years old. Family papers and memorabilia substantiate oral family traditions of Dean Tribble’s challenges, accomplishments, and disappointments while at Stetson. My conversations over the years with prominent lawyers and judges who studied law under my father provided further insight. These sources dictate that my account will be largely anecdotal and subjective, with more emphasis on Dean Tribble’s human and professional qualities than on the arcane politics of academia.
In preparing for its Centennial Celebration Symposium, the Stetson Law Review contacted Paul E. Raymond in Fall 1999 and asked him to submit an essay about his years as dean. Dean Raymond agreed to provide pertinent information and requested that the Stetson Law Review editors convert the information he provided into an essay.
Dean Raymond died on December 3, 1999, just a few weeks after the Review received his answers to the initial questions. To honor and remember him, the Review decided to publish the questions and answers with only minor modifications. We believe that the answers give a truer sense of Dean Raymond and his years of service than we could convey in an essay. We have added some footnotes to provide pertinent information and to put some of Dean Raymond’s comments into historical context.
While a student at Stetson University College of Law in Spring 1959 and president of the Student Bar Association, I had the privilege of introducing Dean Harold Leon “Tom” Sebring to an audience of 100 or so lawyers and judges. I summarized Dean Sebring’s background and finished by saying, “I now introduce to you Tom Sebring, a former judge of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, former justice and chief justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, the dean of our law school, and former head football coach of the University of Florida.” As I said this, the audience burst into laughter. The dean stood, smiled at me, approached the podium, put his hand on my shoulder, and thanked me for the introduction. I had introduced Dean Sebring this way in all seriousness to emphasize how much he had achieved, but to the members of the audience it must have seemed inconceivable that the same person could have been a highly acclaimed jurist, a law school dean, and also the head coach of a national collegiate football power. Surely no one person could have such a multi-faceted career, they must have thought. However, Dean Sebring did all of this and much more. He is one of the most versatile figures in the history of our State and Nation, and to me and others who were his students, he was an outstanding teacher and a great dean.
Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, remarked, “There is an appointed time for everything.” The confirmation of that ancient truism is found in the more modern adage that the convergence of time and place are most often the key to success. The advent of The Law Student Practice Rule (The Rule) in the State of Florida can be attributed to its formulation in accordance with the dictum of that modern maxim. The Rule, having been conceived at the right time and in the right place, suffered a longer than normal gestation period, but its birth produced a unique facet of legal education that intrinsically possesses enduring qualities.
A tribute to the beginnings of clinical education must begin with a special tribute to Dr. Paul Barnard, who is truly the father of clinical legal education as it exists today in the State of Florida. Anyone attempting to write an article about the beginnings of clinical education in law schools would do a disservice if he did not recognize Dr. Barnard as the creator of the newly defined clinical process of legal education in the United States.
The centennial of Stetson University College of Law is an appropriate time to look back at the origins of what is now one of the school’s most prominent institutions, the Stetson Law Review. In existence for only the last 30 of the law school’s 100 years, the Law Review had humble beginnings, functioning from 1970 to 1978 as the Stetson Intramural Law Review, with no nonstudent works and with circulation limited to the College of Law’s students, faculty, and alumni. Yet, these early years provided the necessary foundation for the Law Review’s subsequent achievements and are worth studying for that reason alone. Moreover, the story of those years details the trials and tribulations of the students and faculty who labored to help the enterprise succeed; trials and tribulations that their successors should record and recognize before memories further fade.
Stetson University College of Law’s trial advocacy program has gained much national attention and acclaim during the last decade of the school’s first century, but excellence in trial advocacy is not something new for its graduates. Long before U.S. News & World Report named Stetson’s Trial Advocacy program number one in the nation, Stetson was producing some of the most capable and successful trial lawyers found in any court system. This Article primarily addresses the trial advocacy program at Stetson for the past twenty years, the time frame most familiar to the Author. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Stetson produced many great trial lawyers and judges long before the more recent national attention to our program, alumni who in no small part have contributed to the position of prominence that Stetson’s trial advocacy program enjoys as it begins its next 100 years.