USC Celebrates 100 Years of a Judicial Legacy

The boisterous pageantry for which USC is famous will be on full display today as rabid fans decked out in cardinal and gold Trojan regalia swarm together for the USC-UCLA game.

But the most influential group of Southern Cal enthusiasts may be the bench warmers who gathered quietly for dinner Friday. This bunch made their mark by being stern, staid and togged in basic black.

They are judges, part of a less spectacular but no less distinguished USC tradition. More than 150 of them, graduates of USC Law School from as far back as the 1940s, returned to campus as part of the law school’s centennial celebration.

In all, the law school has turned out at least 425 judges, about 300 of whom are still living, with more than 100 now serving on various courts in Los Angeles County.

Dorothy W. Nelson, who received a master’s degree at the law school in 1956 and later served as dean, said she realized just how thoroughly USC graduates have packed the California judiciary when she became a federal appeals court judge in 1980.

Nelson’s former students accounted for 11 of the 22 judges in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles.

“I told them I would still be correcting their papers,” she said.

Many law schools do not keep a count of their alumni judges, so USC officials can’t boast that their law school has produced more than others. UCLA, which graduated its first law school class a half-century later than USC, in 1952, has more than 100 judges, 40 in Los Angeles County. The University of Texas law school, which has more than twice as many alumni as USC, says 91 of its grads are active judges.

There are historical reasons for the preponderance of USC judges, according to USC Law School associate dean John G. Tomlinson, who is writing a history of the school. The law school grew out of a group of 36 students who gathered in Los Angeles Police Court Judge David C. Morrison’s courtroom after hours in 1896 for impromptu legal tutoring.

The city soon expelled the students from the building because they used too much electricity, which prompted them to form the Los Angeles School of Law in the 1897-88 academic year. The school became a part of USC in 1900.

From 1900 to 1925, the law school was located in buildings within a block of the L.A. County Courthouse, and a fifth of the faculty were judges.

“With so many judges teaching, students saw not only a professor, but a career on the bench embodied in the same person,” Tomlinson said.

USC Law School was also the only accredited law school in the city for several decades.

“People in Southern California who wanted to be lawyers and did not want to go to night school either had to go east or to USC,” said retired California Court of Appeals Judge Robert S. Thompson, who got his law degree in 1942.

Early USC graduates included some of the city’s first minority judges. Edwin Jefferson, a 1931 graduate, was the first black judge in Los Angeles, according to Tomlinson. John Aiso, the first Asian American judge in Los Angeles, studied at the law school in 1940, although he later received his law degree from Harvard.

Georgia Bullock of the class of 1914 became the first woman judge in Southern California in 1924--and promptly received several death threats.

The law school’s early importance was magnified by the city’s need for lawyers during a time of rapid growth. Historian Carey McWilliams wrote that when he graduated from the law school in 1927, “a second-generation law firm in Los Angeles was as rare as a six-generation firm would be in New York or Chicago,” he said.

“It was a smaller community with only a few law schools, so USC graduates were a large percentage of the bar as a whole,” said law school Dean Scott H. Bice. As the city has matured, the percentage of judges who hail from USC is probably closer to that of other universities, Bice said.

Nevertheless, USC’s judicial legacy remains “an important part of the school’s take on itself,” Bice said.

Staff writer Cecilia Rasmussen contributed to this story.