Dean C. Boyack; Legal Education Innovator

Dean C. Boyack, 82, innovator in legal education. After studying economics at Brigham Young University, Boyack taught school for many years. In 1956, he obtained a law degree at Southwestern University School of Law. After a few years of practice in the San Fernando Valley, he began teaching at Southwestern. He was associate dean from 1969 to 1977 and acting dean from 1977 to 1978. In 1974, Boyack made history in legal education by designing and directing the Southwestern Conceptual Approach to Legal Education. Instead of teaching law by the casebook method used for more than a century, Boyack’s system stressed thinking in terms of broad legal concepts and applying those concepts to specific legal situations using a problem-solving process. As the program’s first director, Boyack secured its initial funding from the Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The program has since graduated more than 700 students and is the only two-year program at any law school approved by the American Bar Assn. Boyack was on the California board of the national Parkinson’s Foundation. On Wednesday in Los Angeles of pneumonia.