Lawrence Herman
- Graduation Class
- 1953
- Residence
- Columbus, OH
Moot Court: In the second semester, we had to engage in a moot court program. I had always enjoyed library work. I enjoyed writing. I enjoyed writing a brief. I had done theatrical work as a kid and I absolutely loved getting up in the court room and making an argument… It’s sort of theater, but I’m the writer and the director and the producer and the star when I get up in the court room and make an argument. I also, as a result of that experience, began to understand what was going on in the classroom, that the teachers were really asking the kind of questions a judge would ask of an advocate representing a client at appellate arguments. I knew then that this was what I wanted to do. I was the editor-in-chief of the Law Review and I finished first in my class. I attribute all that to moot court. It was a kind of life changing moment.
Faculty: Dean Frank Rowley taught contracts. And he was a rather foreboding person. He had been a colonel in WWII and had worked on contract work in Washington for the Army. He acted as though he was still a colonel. I was frightened of him in the classroom. He was a good teacher; he knew the subject. I enjoyed the class, but I knew I wasn’t going to mess around with him in the classroom.
We had several rather young professors. One of them was Robert Toepfer….in the days when I went to law school we had two separate courses in what was called Equity - one course at the end of the second semester and another course at the beginning of the third semester. He taught both of those courses. I thought a great deal of him. He knew his materials very well. I liked the subject matter. I liked his grasp of the course and later in life when I started to teach I tried to model myself after Mr. Toepfer.
Another faculty member I remember very, very well is Fred Dewey, who taught Evidence and Torts in the first year. He was another tough person in the classroom. We had the county prosecutor, Carson Hoy, as an adjunct professor who taught criminal law. He wasn’t the scholar that the regular law faculty members were, but we knew that he had a lot of trial and criminal experience as an assistant prosecutor and then the prosecuting attorney of Hamilton County…he got me interested in the subject of criminal law, which was something I really had not thought about until I went to law school.
The law librarian Alfred Morrison, whom everybody called Pop -- he was the oldest member of the faculty -- taught property law. He was very dry, but very thorough. We learned from him to have an eye for detail. The focus on little things, not forget the big things, but often the big things were made up of a lot of little things. All in all I had a very, very good legal education at the University of Cincinnati.
Law School Building: What I remember so much on a daily basis from law school was walking up the stairs. The building was a Williamsburg colonial building when I was a law student. There were pillars in front and I would walk in the building past those pillars and I thought I was entering the U.S. Supreme Court. It gave me a sense of professionalism just to do that.
Family: My father died [and my mother]… supported the family and kept me in law school. She wanted me to stay at the University of Cincinnati. As a result of what she did, I was able to go for two more years, graduate, get a teaching fellowship at Northwestern Law School, go into the Army JAG corps and do trial criminal work for three years, clerk for a federal judge in Chicago, then start teaching first in Cleveland at Western Reserve, ultimately at Ohio State. I would never have had any of those opportunities had I not graduated from a first class law school. …What she did was a life-altering experience for me -- keeping me in law school at UC.