The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 86, July 1982 - April, 1983 Page: 164
616 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
as his initial donation to the college that bears his name was amply
twice the annual operating budget of the University of Texas. Thus,
civil, common, and statutory law were included in the enumeration
of major areas of instruction, but comparative law was not (and would
not be for another decade). There is, however, another matter in
which Judge Hastings may have given advice or at least provided in-
spiration. His senior professor, he reported with obvious pride, was
"Dr. John Norton Pomeroy, Head Master." Pomeroy was one of the
four or five outstanding legal authors in the United States at the time;
Texas decided to go after an even more distinguished one.5
This brings us to the second point of substantial interest cursorily
mentioned in the regents' minutes: the initial selection of the "lead-
ing" professor. Thomas McIntyre Cooley was at that time a professor
at the University of Michigan and a member of the supreme court of
that state. His treatise on Constitutional Limitations, first published in
1868, had quickly established its author as the leading constitutional
lawyer in the country. Five years later he published an annotated edi-
tion of William Blackstone's Commentaries, commonly referred to as
Cooley's Blackstone, which came to enjoy a similar reputation as an
indispensable tool of competent practitioners and scholarly judges.6
The selection of Cooley by the regents is therefore quite in keeping
with the initial faculty recruitment policy then prevailing, which
Governor Roberts summed up as follows in a letter to Ashbel Smith:
"I agree with you that we ought to get the ablest and most famous
professors in the University that we are able to induce to come here.
It is in part for that reason that I recommended to the Board to com-
mence at the top, if we could have but a few of them at first." What is
so surprising is, first, that a jurist of Cooley's stature and current offi-
cial status should have been deemed available, and second, that a
northerner with his political convictions should have been so readily
acceptable. Cooley had been outspoken in his condemnation of slav-
5Ibid. In 1888 the University had an income of about $45,00ooo and expenditures of
about $49,ooo. Thomas D. Wooten, undated draft statement, Regents' Correspondence,
1888 (Ashbel Smith Hall, Austin). "General and Comparative Jurisprudence" was a com-
ponent of one of the two courses of study in the optional third-year program leading to
a master of laws degree, inaugurated in 1893. See Catalogue of the University of Texas
for 1892-93 (Austin, 1893), 98, 99 (footnote quotation).
6Thomas M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon
the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (Boston, 1868); William
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England ... , ed. Thomas M. Cooley (2 vols.;
Chicago, 1871). For a list of subsequent editions, see Elizabeth Gaspar Brown, Legal Edu-
cation at Michigan, 1859-1959 (Ann Arbor, 1959), 285, 859.164
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 86, July 1982 - April, 1983, periodical, 1982/1983; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101209/m1/200/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.