Throwback Thursday: A Look at Temple Law Through the Years

It was way back in 1895 when Temple Law was founded as Temple College’s Department of Law. The law school graduated its first class (of 16 students) in 1901.

 

Here is a look at the full list of faculty from the 1908–1909 academic year.

Elementary Law sounds like a Sherlock Holmes crash course worth taking. We wonder what the bar exam prep for that looked like.

 

 

By the 1932–1933 Academic Year, the faculty had been expanded significantly:

 

This was well before the school was housed on Temple’s main campus.

 

One of its many locations before moving permanently to Klein Hall in 1973 was a room in Gimbel’s department store in Center City.

From the 1942 Temple College Templar: “The attractive library in the New Law School quarters in Gimbel building.” [Pictured Right]

Not pictured: racks of clothes, shoes, and housewares. The students would have to walk through them to get to class.

During the 1940s, the law school experienced steep declines in enrollment and financial difficulties.

From the 1942 Temple College Templar: “There is no Students Army Training Corps, as in 1918, to crowd the halls with students in uniform. But in classrooms and laboratories students are training to be of service, whether called to duty at the front or at home.”

But through dedicated efforts by alumni and staff (including Judge Charles Klein, namesake of Klein Hall), the school was saved from collapse. By 1954, the law school had even returned to Temple’s main campus.

Speaking of the main campus, here is an image from the 1956 Templar. It is a photo of the intersection of Broad and Montgomery– the left image was taken in 1936, and the right image 20 years later.

Here are some photos from the law school taken during the same period.

 

Notably, they are a glaring reminder of the lack of diversity traditionally inherent in the legal field.

Despite the apparent lack of diversity, attending law school in the 1950s did have its financial advantages.

For perspective, that’s an entire semester for less than the current cost of a textbook (not adjusted for inflation . . . ).

One of Temple Law’s favorite promotional devices is the token shot of students gathered on the steps outside of Klein Hall (formerly the “Temple University Law Center”).

Those students look really happy to be reading that casebook.

In the 1990s and 2000s, under Dean Robert Reinstein, the Law School prospered, drawing an increasingly bright and diverse student body…

As well as many beloved faculty members.

Spotted in a 2006 Temple Law Brochure: Editor of the 10-Q, Professor David Hoffman and contributor Professor Salil Mehra!

In 2008, Dean Reinstein returned to the faculty after 19 years and was succeeded by JoAnne Epps, who had served for many years as an Associate Dean. Under her leadership, Temple Law gained national prominence for its experiential programs and enhanced business and transactional law curriculum.

She’s been owning it since 88’.

By 2014, every classroom was “internet equipped.”

We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at Temple Law School through the years. If you have old pictures or other memorabilia of the Law School, feel free to send scans our way. We hope to have more “Throwback Thursdays” in the future.

And at the very least, we can be thankful that a Temple yearbook, with this ad in it, is forever preserved for posterity.

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Ed note: To compile these images I shut myself in the “rare reading” room in Klein (it exists!) and poured over yearbooks, law bulletins, pamphlets, and brochures spanning the last 120+ years of Temple Law History. Thank you to the helpful library staff, as well as to the countless students, faculty, and other subjects of these photographs that made doing this research genuinely fun.

To see every image used in this article, click through the gallery below:

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