Legal Center

Onto the campus of Southern Methodist University swarmed more than 4,000 members of the insurance section of the American Bar Association last week for their annual discussion of the latest techniques and trickeries of insurance legalistics. Their presence was one more reminder of how successful S.M.U.'s South western Legal Center has been in realizing the goal that Dean Robert Gerald Storey set for it five years ago: to become one of the foremost legal laboratories in the U.S. (TIME, April 30, 1951).

Designed to give U.S. law students access to the kind of training for which London's tradition-encrusted Inns of Court have been famous for centuries, the center has enabled students to rub elbows with practicing lawyers, share their libraries and dining halls, listen to their shoptalk. Lawyers from all over the U.S. have come to teach at the center, do research work there, attend forums and legal clinics. In its chosen fields--tax law, oil and gas law, international law, insurance law, administrative law--the center has provided a staff of experts that has made it a legal mecca not only for the Southwest and the U.S. in general, but for big slices of Latin America, the Far and Middle East and Europe. Among the center's other accomplishments:

P: The Graduate School of American and Foreign Law, which takes in a special annual quota of students from Latin America, offers a one-year Master of Laws degree to students from any friendly free nation outside the U.S., and underwrites professors carrying on legal research and writing projects.

P: An institute on oil and gas law, which this year drew more than 800 lawyers from the U.S. and the oil and gas provinces of Canada.

P: A free legal clinic in which law students provide advice to those who cannot afford lawyers.

Much of the credit for the center's rapid growth belongs to brisk, balding, 62-year-old Dean Storey, a veteran corporation lawyer who did not complete his undergraduate education until 1947 (he got into practice by "reading the law"). Dean Storey has paid less attention to physical expansion (the center is still housed in the original three buildings) than he has to attracting top legal talent to his 18-man faculty. With the center's influence firmly established in the U.S. and Latin America (where it tries to operate as a kind of miniature United Nations), Storey is turning his attention to the center's responsibilities in other parts of the world. He feels strongly that the U.S. has failed properly to project the American judicial and constitutional idea. Says he: "Our Government has spent billions in restoring shattered economies and social activities in foreign countries. But it has totally neglected the effort to return the rule of law to those countries. Our greatest objective, I think, is not to sell our system, but to give advice and help and professional guidance--and that is one of the most important tasks of the legal profession of our country. I'm a great believer in the future of the rule of law, not men."

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