One of The Law School's Greatest Graduates

Justice Owen Josephus Roberts

When Owen Josephus Roberts (1875 - 1955) resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1945, he did not retire to his farmhouse in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. Rather he resumed many activities. He was elected president of the American Philosophical Society and president of the Atlantic Union. In the latter post he advocated not world federalism, but a union of Western democracies. He was a trustee of colleges and universities, a director of corporations, and a lay officer of the Episcopal church. The most significant of his many works late in life, however, was his return to the Law School to assume its deanship.

Roberts was elected dean of the Law School effective September 1, 1948, and presided over it for three academic years before his retirement on June 30, 1951. He taught torts to a section of the first-year class and conducted a third-year seminar on constitutional law. His were the first years in which applicants to the School took the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT). He introduced the Legal Aid program under Professor Louis B. Schwartz and hired faculty members A. Leo Levin, Noyes E. Leech, and Paul J. Mishkin, who would have a lasting influence on the next generation of students. Roberts was the last of William Draper Lewis's proteges to direct the Law School, but in many ways he demonstrated that he was also a window on the future.

Louis B. Schwartz		A. Leo Levin

Part V...