Article by Joel Wm. Friedman
The Law School's building was about to burst at its seams. Its library could no longer contain all the books, tables, and people that competed for space. Classrooms and corridors were feeling the strain created by an increasing number of students and faculty members. The Board of Administrators of Tulane University, “realizing the importance of the Law College to this state and desirous of further insuring its development,” determined that the present location simply could not meet the growing demands of its students and faculty and resolved to provide the Law School with a new home.
Although this scenario is well known to the members of the graduating classes of 1996 and 1997, it is not the tale of our school's relocation from Joseph Merrick Jones Hall to John Giffen Weinmann Hall. Sixty-seven years before the dedication of Weinmann Hall, a much smaller, but equally proud group of faculty, students, alumni, and friends of the College of Law of the Tulane University of Louisiana celebrated the school's move to its new location on the University's uptown campus.
The Law Department of the University of Louisiana opened its doors on December 6, 1847, in federal Judge Thomas Howard McCaleb's courtroom in the Customhouse on Canal Street. After a succession of downtown locations, the Law Department moved to the University's uptown campus in 1906, when it was allotted space in Gibson Hall, a building it shared for nearly twenty-two years with several other academic departments. By 1927, however, the overcrowding in Gibson Hall had become so severe that the University Board of Administrators ordered the construction of a “modern stone fireproof building.” The Law College moved in 1928 into a three-story Indiana limestone annex to the New Science Building which, in 1936, was named Dinwiddie Hall in honor of the University's outgoing President, Albert Bledsoe Dinwiddie.
The last entering class to commence its law school career in Gibson Hall arrived in September of 1926. This group, the graduating class of 1929, is notable, however, not for this historical anecdote, but because one of its members became one of this nation's most influential and revered federal judges and the most illustrious graduate in the history of Tulane Law School. Among the twenty-six men who registered for classes at Gibson Hall on September 22, was a short, skinny, twenty-two-year-old from New Orleans named John Minor Wisdom.
About the Author
Joel Wm. Friedman.
Citation
70 Tul. L. Rev. 2091 (1996)