Pacific McGeorge History
In the fall of 1921, a handful of students were waiting on the second floor of a downtown Sacramento building for their first-year law classes to begin. They were sadly informed that the would-be operators of the fledgling school had decided to abandon the project as of the previous evening. Their professor, a young Stanford Law School graduate from Maine named Verne Adrian McGeorge, offered to lecture on the law at his residence. The students accepted his offer. It was an inauspicious debut for what would become an internationally known law school.
The arrangement continued until January 1924 when several civic-minded leaders joined McGeorge in founding a non-profit corporation, the Sacramento College of Law. The incorporators and members of the first Board of Trustees included Judge Peter Shields, a founder of the University of California, Davis. They had a definite purpose in mind: to provide an opportunity for legal education where none existed.
McGeorge was appointed manager of the college, later named dean and professor of law. The new institution acquired quarters in a building at the corner of 10th and L Streets. Tuition was $100 per year.
In 1925, the first annual commencement program of the Sacramento College of law lists a graduating class of five. A handful of students earned their law degrees each of the next five years. The little law school had little to boast about, but it had its first female graduate, Rose Sheehan, ’27E, a quarter-century before the Harvard Law School.
In 1929, the Board of Trustees, after receiving complaints about the similarity of names from Sacramento City College and Sacramento Main High School, changed the law school’s shingle to McGeorge College of Law in honor of its founder, who was still teaching despite terminal skin cancer. He died several months later.
Various people stepped forward in the 1930s to keep the one-room night school afloat. Russell Harris, a Sacramento County Bar leader, became dean and remained in that position until 1933. By that time, student enrollment had risen to 44 and the school reported revenues of $7,533. Gilford Rowland, a past president of the State Bar of California, was next appointed dean and the school moved to upstairs quarters at 824 J Street. The student body remained approximately the same size until 1937, at which time Lawrence Dorety succeeded Rowland.
As with many small colleges, McGeorge was closed during the war years. McGeorge’s widow, Annabel, who served as registrar until her retirement in 1958, kept the place “alive” during those years answering all correspondence and assuring future law students that there was, and would continue to be, a law school for them.
When the law school opened for evening classes under Dean John Swan in the fall of 1946, it again had a new location at 902 J Street on the third floor of the Ruhstaller Building over a radio store. The fire escape consisted of ropes tied to a metal steam-heat register.
In 1955, the law school moved across the street to 924 J Street over the Arcade Bar. As if a gin mill wasn’t enough of a distraction at this location, there was a ravioli factory in the basement. All of the cooking odors were carried to the upper floors through the elevator shaft.
And so it was over a late-night plate of ravioli, that Swan and a young attorney who taught at the law school, Gordon D. Schaber, vowed to find a permanent home for the institution. An opportunity to obtain the use of vacant city health facility, a well-baby clinic at the corner of 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue in the Oak Park neighborhood, presented itself in late 1956 and the Board of Trustees agreed to move the school there.
Dean Swan passed away unexpectedly two months prior to the move, but with the assistance of a borrowed pickup truck in which all the library books and furniture were loaded, Acting Dean Schaber moved the school in one trip. When the law school opened for its program of evening classes in the fall of 1957, enrollment was 123 students. There was still no full-time faculty or staff. Library holdings totaled 1,500 volumes. Total assets were listed at $4,000 and the annual budget was $36,000.
Thus began the modern era at McGeorge. Schaber determined that the law school was going to make a name for itself. That involved facilities, faculty and publicity. He planned and budgeted for the facilities, knowing that on the horizon increased enrollment would throw off funds for needed expansion, maybe even a campus some day. Schaber knew who the best lawyers in town were and he coaxed them into teaching at McGeorge. He immersed himself in community activities, forging friendships with every state and city official and business leader in the sleepy state capital.
And even though it was only a small night school, Schaber made sure it was a judge, senator or celebrity who gave the commencement address. His friend, Bay area novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, was the invitee for the 1960 ceremony. Gardner, however, had an emergency appendectomy a week before the event and was forced to bow out. Schaber offered to wheel him over in his hospital bed, but Gardner had a better idea. He told Schaber to invite actor Raymond Burr to give the speech. Burr was the star of “Perry Mason,” a television show based on Gardner’s books that just happened to be the No. 1 rated TV show in the 1959-60 season. Burr agreed and, needless to say, wowed what was an unusually small audience for him. Schaber and he became fast friends and he went on to become a major benefactor of the school.
In late 1964, Schaber won accreditation by the Committee of Bar Examiners for the state of California. By that time, Schaber already had some of the best attorneys in Sacramento in his impressive stable of part-time faculty, including Claude Rohwer, Robert Puglia, Frank Richardson, Jim Diepenbrock and Robert Stark. The following year, though, he set his sights on a young lawyer who everyone saw as a rising star. He went to Anthony Kennedy’s office and wouldn’t budge until he got yes for an answer. The future Supreme Court justice began teaching Constitutional Law in 1965. He found himself enjoying the classroom, so much so that he taught every year until the Senate confirmed President Reagan’s nomination to the nation’s highest court.
McGeorge merged with the University of the Pacific in 1966 and began offering day classes the following year. Schaber maintained the evening program of the school’s origins so that greater Sacramento area residents still had the opportunity to pursue a career conversion to the legal profession. McGeorge was accredited by the American Bar Association in 1968, paving the way for its rise to national prominence.
Schaber’s approach to legal education was innovative, pragmatic and farsighted. He built a campus courtroom that won national recognition in 1973 for its technological advances. He made overtures to neighboring Nevada, where there was no law school, so that students from that state could have their McGeorge tuitions subsidized. He established a permanent McGeorge presence in Europe, anticipating dramatic growth in international trade.
The law school campus, the world’s largest, was built out in the 1970s and 1980s. There were seven classrooms, clinic facilities, a lecture hall, student housing and a library that became the second-largest private law library in the state of California. The full time faculty, created when the Day Division was launched in 1967, attracted law professors from around the country. Many a visiting professor from a more renowned law school decided to stay on in Sacramento -- for 20 or 25 years.
It was a stunning accomplishment, one that earned numerous plaudits from the ABA, which bestowed on him its highest honor for service in legal education (The Kutak Award) in 1991.
Schaber was forced to resign his position as dean in 1991 because of health problems, the same year McGeorge became a fully integrated part of the University of the Pacific. George Washington University law professor and federal administrator Gerald Caplan was selected to succeed Schaber and the school’s enrollment in the mid-1990s made it the 21 st largest law school in the country. Former CIA General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker became dean in 2002 and the school celebrates its 80th anniversary with a new summer program in China.
From lectures in an attorney’s home to lectures halfway round the world, Pacific McGeorge has come a long way.
