Content area
Full text
DOUGLAS LAYCOCK^
I. INTRODUCTION
This issue of the Texas International Law Journal honors Charles Alan Wright on the occasion of his retirement from The University of Texas Law School. Charlie's retirement is a momentous event in the Law School's history; he has served the Law School well for forty-two years. For most of those years, he was the best known and most respected member of this faculty; for all of those years, he was one of its major figures. His remarkable career spans more than a third of the Law School's history; his story and the Law School's story are inseparable. His personal accomplishments and his institutional loyalty contributed mightily to the Law School's progress over the last four decades.
I cannot imagine Charlie as a callow youth, and maybe he never was one. He has been described as a brash young man, and he was at any rate a remarkably young tenured law professor when he arrived at the Law School in 1955. Born in Philadelphia in September 1927, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1947 and from Yale Law School in 1949, clerked for Judge Charles E. Clark on the Second Circuit, and assumed his duties as Assistant Professor at Minnesota on or about his twenty-third birthday. He was promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure, in 1953. He came to Texas just as he turned twenty-eight.1
Whether or not Charlie was any different in 1955, everyone and everything else was very different. Several of my younger colleagues had not been born and were not in contemplation; I suspect that their future parents had not met and were still in high school or even junior high. I was in second grade, proudly wearing my Davy Crockett T-shirt and artificial coon skin cap. If Charlie took his young son to see the Disney movie that fueled the Crockett craze, he learned that the eroded desert canyons of far west Texas begin at the Arkansas border.2
II. THE LAW SCHOOL IN 1955
Disney's portrayal of Texas was bad fiction, but the reality of Austin and the Law School in those days was dramatically different from the Austin and the Law School of today. The U.S. flag carried only forty-eight stars, and Texas was the...