Steinheimer interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2] 
Steinheimer: This is just off the record, I think really that to get a feel for what has happened in the growth and development of the law school, you should go to Sally, who apparently you've done a lot of working with on this, and she, as the librarian, is excellent, and she will have all of these things at her fingertips for you. But what 
you should ask her for is the catalogs that were published each year of the law school. I don't know what date this is, but this is the catalog, very recent, the last year or two, was sent out to all undergraduate students who were considering law schools. This is their first contact, in many instances, with what we have to offer, do you see, what we tell them in this catalog. And there is a lot of good information that may be of interest to you in the catalogs which gives you each year the people who are on the faculty and also--well, this one doesn't do it, but earlier catalogs gave the list of all the students who were the students of the school, by year and by source of origin,. where they came from, and so forth. Warren: Was the Law School publishing its own catalog when you arrived? Steinheimer: Yes, but it wasn't much of a catalog, to be quite honest with you. Warren:. Because this is very impressive. 
Steinheimer: It was really a simple affair. But really you ought to get the catalog 
that was here when I came here in '68, look at the catalog in '68. (You can take that 
with you.) 
Warren: Thank you. 
Steinheimer: Look at the catalog that was in use in 1968. You see, Sally will have 
those things in her file, in the library archives. Tell her to pull the catalogs that 
were published each year for the first few years and then maybe sample some in the 
last six or eight years, you see, and it will, I think, tell you better than I ever could 
the growth and development that took place in our law school, both from the 
standpoint of the richness and diversity of the student body that developed from the 
time in 1968, when I came here, until the present day, and will tell you about the 
growth of the faculty over that period of time, who the faculty were each year, and 
also will give you a description of the programs that were in the Law School. Over 
the years, we've developed a lot of new programs and student activities. If you just 
sit down with those catalogs, you're going to see all of the development that took 
place, do you see, over those years. 
And then if you would also, from the standpoint of the placement thing, which as been very important to us, the fact that we've been able to develop and broaden our placement opportunities for our students as they graduate, start with the fact that we had nothing when I came here in 1968, really, to try to, in a formal way, assist our students in employment. 
Then go over to the placement office and talk to placement. Unfortunately for you, the placement director who was here for a number of years has resigned and left to go to Richmond, but she could have given you a good picture of that. I don't know who's in there right now, but go in there and talk to the placement person there and ask them to try to give you an idea, they must have it in their files, as to when the placement operation really first got under way there. This was all under 
my aegis, but I can't remember all this, when was the placement office first got in operation and then have them kind of trace for you the development that has taken place there. My goodness, ask about the number of law firms we have come in here year after year. We have dozens and dozens and dozens who come in. Warren: That's quite a development from nothing to dozens and dozens. Steinheimer: That's right, yeah. Warren: You mentioned the richness and diversity of the student body. I understand that you are single-handedly responsible for that, because you used to recruit by individual. Steinheimer: That's right. When I came to the Law School, I think we had one black student, and, of course, no women, and that was the only black student who'd ever been in the Law School. One of my objectives when I came, and I told 
President Huntley as much, was that I intended to try and develop the representation of minorities in the student body, and also I told him that I would keep the pressure on him to let the Law School have women in the Law School. So he knew from the time he hired me that those were the conditions on which I was coming into the job, and he was always very cooperative in all of this, and I did do the best I could to expand the minority representation in the law school, and we finally were successful in being permitted to admit women to the Law School. Warren: Tell me about those programs. Steinheimer: Well, the program--and also I was anxious to have more variety in the demographics and backgrounds of our students. When I came here, most of them were from Virginia and the majority of them were from VMI and from Washington and Lee. And I knew that if we were going to amount to anything as a law school, we would have to have more demographic diversity than that. So, yes, I 
worked very hard at trying to expand our contacts with undergraduate schools to interest their students in attending our law school. 
Warren: How did you do that? Steinheimer: And, of course, in that process I also emphasized to undergraduate schools our interests in minorities, you see. That worked out. And, of course, once we were permitted to have women, that fell into place, too, you see, but the process was one of visiting dozens and dozens and dozens of undergraduate schools and telling them about Washington and Lee Law School. Warren: Did you go to just any school or did you go specifically to see a specific candidate? Steinheimer: No, I targeted. No, I targeted schools. Warren: How did you find those people? Steinheimer: I targeted schools. Then as I targeted schools and visited schools, I talked to students in those schools about our law school, and gradually over a period of time I was able to interest students from a considerable area of the country to give us a try here. So there again, if you look at those catalogs, look at the catalog when I 
came here, see where students came from, then go through the catalogs from that point on and see what a change there was over the years. Warren: How did you target schools? What kind of schools did you target to bring in qualified blacks? Steinheimer: Well, that ain't easy. You can target all-black undergraduate schools to try to interest them in coming here, and I did. I visited any number of all-black undergraduate schools with some degree of regularity to try to interest the students in coming here, and we had some success, gradually, with that. But also you will be able to make contact with minorities by visiting schools that aren't all-black. For instance, there are some good black students at Swarthmore or Princeton or here, there, wherever, and if you can make the contact with the good black student at those schools, you may have a shot of them being interested in your school, you see. 
Warren: Was that fairly unusual for the dean to be going out and recruiting on a 
one-to-one basis like that? Steinheimer: Well, I'll put it this way, at the time I came here, the top-tier law schools were visiting undergraduate schools to try to build their ties to undergraduate schools and get a flow of students coming to the law schools from those undergraduate schools. At the University of Michigan I had been active in the operations at that school with respect to making meaningful contacts with undergraduate schools for the purpose of stimulating good students to apply to the University of Michigan. Well, I simply carried on with that when I came to Washington and Lee and used a lot of contacts that I had with good undergraduate schools to shift their focus from the University of Michigan to Washington and Lee University and had many people who had a lot of confidence in me in the other undergraduate schools, who were happy to listen to my story. 
For example, just to show you what can happen, Bob Goodlatte, do you know who he is? Warren: A representative? Steinheirner: Yes. He's a graduate of the law school here. Bob Goodlatte, I interviewed on one of my visits to Boden University, up in Maine, and interested Bob in coming down here to our law school. So Bob Goodlatte came down to our law school here in Virginia and liked it, and you can see what he's done with it. There's other stories I just haven't tried to think of, but that just occurred to me. Warren: Well, that's a good one. That's a good one. What was your sales pitch? Steinheimer: Well, obviously there are a number of very prestigious law schools who are competing for good students, who are coming out of undergraduate schools, and you don't go out to undergraduate schools and knock other good law schools. That's the last thing you do. They're all good. They're all fine law schools. 
What you have to do is talk about what your law school may have to offer that will 
not be found perhaps at other law schools, and certainly one of the things I had in 
mind as we were developing this law school was that too many of the good law schools, the top-notch law schools in this country, had gotten far too large and impersonal. 
One of the important things, I thought, to professional education was a personal touch in the educational process, where students knew the professors, where the professors knew their students, where there was some real honest interaction between the students and the professors, because I think that means a lot in developing the professional attitudes that I want to see in young lawyers going out into the field. 
So I felt that one of the great assets we would have once we were able to have a fine facility as a locus for it, one of the great things we would have to offer was that we would be a school with a first-rate library, a school with a first-rate faculty, but which was unique in that it was small enough that we could have this feeling of community which can't exist in these great big law schools. 
So that was always one of the points I would make with people in the undergraduate schools, that this was something that was different about us. It wasn't for everyone, but there is something that we have to offer that you can't find at other good law schools. So if this appeals to a student, this is where he or she can find it, do you see? I think that's one of the most important distinctions between this school and the other good law schools that you have across the country. They all have good faculties, they all have good libraries, they all have nice buildings, but there's a spirit in this law school because of its size which can't be replicated at the University of Michigans and the Harvards and the Stanfords and so forth; they're too big. Warren: So as you put a class together, it must have been-the only thing I can equate in my life is putting together the perfect dinner party, where you invite just 
the right guests. Were you trying to pull together within a class a certain range of diversity? Steinheimer: No. I did want geographical diversity, I think we needed that, and certainly I was interested in the minority situation. I was interested in the women situation, and we got that fixed. But I was interested in geographical diversity. I was interested in differences in educational background of the students. I didn't want everyone to come from the University of Virginia; they're all going to be the same people. I didn't want them all to come from the University of Michigan. I wanted them to come from a lot of different undergraduate schools. Each of those undergraduate schools would have finished off that undergraduate in a slightly different way than the other schools, so that you had a somewhat different individual from School A, undergraduate School A, than at undergraduate School 
B. And what I wanted was a mix of students from a number of different undergraduate schools so that when you brought them together, they would have had a fine educational experience at this school they attended, but also they would bring to this law school that background of a fine educational experience, but one which had a little different slant to it than the experience of the student at School B. This enriches the experience of the students here when they are mixed together with all of those different educational experiences at different institutions. Do you see? Warren: It makes perfect sense to me. I would assume that in particular for minorities and for women, that it would be important to them to have diversity on the faculty, too. Steinheimer: That's right. Warren: So you had to work at that as well, I assume? Steinheimer: Exactly. And we've worked on it, and I think we will never quit 
working on it. They will always be trying to better the situation. But we do have 
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some problems, particularly with respect to minority faculty, because it is not the easiest thing in the world to attract minority faculty to a small town like Lexington. They have lots of opportunities and a lot of them are going to feel more comfortable connecting up with schools in metropolitan communities where they can also get a job. And while we can pay them as well as they will be paid at those schools, they prefer to live in that urban environment. So it isn't easy to attract minority faculty. We work on it constantly. 
Now, as far as the gender thing is concerned, I think we've done a good job. We find a lot of fine female persons who can be interested in this community. It's safe, it's clean, it has a wonderful cultural environment, and so forth. They can be interested. We do pretty well, I think, on that score. But we have a way to go to get some diversity on minority faculty. But it's not an easy task. Warren: So when you were recruiting minority students, would they ask that question? Steinheimer: Oh, of course. And quite frankly, we have the same problem with respect to the minority students that we want to attract, because, quite frankly, 
they're going to be more comfortable, by and large, attending a school that is in a more cosmopolitan, urban-type environment than our school. It's not easy, always to attract them. 
We have had increasingly good success in attracting minorities, particularly the blacks, and I'm very proud of what I think we've been able to accomplish with some of the black students. We've got one black student who graduated from here who is now a judge in Georgia; one who graduated from here who is now a judge in Virginia; we've got one who is a member of the state legislature; we've got another black who is head of the Liquor Control Board here in Virginia. So we've made a contribution to giving those students some opportunities. Warren: Have any of them ever considered staying on the faculty? 
Steinheimer: Not during my tenure as dean. But what may have happened since I 
retired as dean, I just don't know about that. 
Warren: I know you certainly opened this place up, wide open, compared to what it 
once was. Now is there still preference given to Washington and Lee 
undergraduates who want to come here for law school? 
Steinheimer: No, there was not when I was dean. There was no preference. The 
one preference we gave them--and this is as it should be, I think--is that if a person 
qualified for the wait list, there are no preferences at all as far as your making it in or 
making the wait list or out, that's without regard to preference. But once a person 
was on the wait list, then we thought it was perfectly proper, if we had openings that 
occurred in the process of filling out the class and we had to go to the wait list for 
that purpose, that it would be perfectly proper and indeed very appropriate for us to 
look at the fact that this is a Washington and Lee undergraduate, or this is a son of 
an alumnus of Washington and Lee Law School or this is the daughter of a 
Washington and Lee Law School alumnus, you see, but only at that point. And to 
that extent, yes, it can be helpful. 
Warren: I know we can't come up with an exact statistic. Each year about how 
many Washington and Lee seven-year people are there, or were there? 
Steinheimer: Well, for a time there were too few, but I think that has gradually improved. But as I say, they must meet the standards in order to be admitted, with 
that slight preference given if they make the wait list. Otherwise, they've got to 
meet the standards. 
Now, I want to say this, that one problem you have with the undergraduate Washington and Lee and this law school at Washington and Lee is that, quite understandably, a student who has been first rate in the undergraduate school will have opportunities to go to law school at other places than to Washington and Lee, and, quite understandably, those topnotch students who have that choice often feel-­
and I have to support them in it and I will tell them frankly that's the way I feel-­that if they have the choice, they may be better off going somewhere else for their law school experience so that they get into a new climate, a new atmosphere, and have to kind of start all over to do it, in law school, instead of just moving across to this law school. And so, quite frankly, we lose a lot of the best Washington and Lee law students who we would love to have come to us and to whom we offer admission, but they rightly feel they're going to be better off going to another good law school in another locale to broaden themselves, so that makes it tough for us. Warren: I can tell you've put a lot of time and energy into this and the school is very grateful for it. I can tell you, you have a fabulous reputation here for what you've done here. You mentioned a lot of new programs. What kind of new 
programs? Steinheimer: Well, here again, go to the catalogs, please. Take the catalogs in 1968 and '69 and '70 and compare them to the catalogs that we had in 1980s for example, which was towards the end of my tenure, at the end of my tenure. Look at those catalogs, they're very instructive, but you'll see. And on that point, look and see the activities that are described in the catalog in 1968. Warren: What kinds of things are you most proud of? Steinheimer: Well, you have your Moot Court activities of various kinds, you have your Legal Aid activities of various kinds, you have your law review activities, and then you have Student Bar Association activities. I don't think there was any Legal Aid at all when I came here. We built a Legal Aid organization in Lexington. We 
built a Legal Aid organization that gave legal aid to the people in the mental hospital up in Staunton. 
I got a program started with the support from Tom Clark, who was then the justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Tom Clark helped me get a program started with the federal women's prison over in Alderson, West Virginia, 
where we regularly give legal assistance to those women. You see, we built all that 
up. 
Our Moot Court programs have grown in size and quality over the years. The Law Review has always been a good law review. I think there hasn't been that dramatic a change there. Just look at the catalogs. Warren: What exactly does the Law Review do? Steinheimer: Law Review is a legal journal written primarily for the profession, for lawyers, and it, generally speaking, takes topics of timely interest to the profession and to our society, not just the members, but to our society and writes scholarly discussions of the pros and cons and so forth of those problems. That's generally what it does. 
In the process, we get mature scholars who will contribute articles to our journal, and at the same time one of the most important parts of the Law Review is that the students publish it and they have their own editorial board that screens the articles from these scholars that they think are worthy of publication in our journal and they edit those articles. They also supervise the preparation of smaller articles which we call the Law Review comments or notes, that are written by our students, and our students thus develop the ability to articulate their ideas and points of view in regard to important and timely legal topics. If they do that and do it well, they will be published in our journal, you see. Warren: So how many students get involved with the Law Review? Steinheimer: I think you'll have to ask them. It's grown since I came here. But check that with Sally. Sally will know. She will have the data. Warren: Do all schools have a law review? Steinheimer: No, not all schools, but all good schools do. All good schools have a law review. 
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Warren: I know I've seen that it's used as a selling point for the school, that we 
have a law review. 
Steinheimer: Yes, that's right. But all good schools have a law review, and it's quite 
a distinction for us to be selected and to be a member of the law review. 
Warren: Who does that selecting? 
Steinheimer: The students themselves. It's a student-run organization and that's 
the interesting and important thing about it. It's prestigious. Each of these law 
reviews of the good schools--it's a prestigious legal publication that is student-run 
and operated, and it teaches our students a lot of responsibility and care in their legal 
thoughts, articulation of their ideas, and so on. 
Warren: Are there any particular women graduates that you are particularly proud 
of that have gone on to do extraordinary things? 
Steinheimer: If I had thought about it, I could have developed this. Just off the top 
of my head, I hesitate to try to describe male or female students who have 
particularly distinguished themselves. 
Now, I just happened to think of the Goodlatte idea because it occurred to me 
that he had come from Boden, and I had contacted him up there, but Goodlatte is 
just one of dozen of students who have gone out and distinguished themselves in 
our profession. I just have to take a little time to refresh my mind on it. And 
certainly there are some women who have equally distinguished themselves as 
they've gone out into the profession. I'm just not pulling something off the top of 
my head right now. Warren: One last thing, from my point of view, that we haven't really talked about was how you got around to do this kind of thing. You have a name around here as 
the Flying Dean. Tell me about that. Steinheimer: Yes, yes, yes. Well, I found that my airplane was one of the greatest assets imaginable for purposes of my doing all of the things I needed to do with respect to helping out these things I wanted to accomplish at the law school, because it gave me tremendous mobility and it was invaluable to me. And I must say that I enjoyed the flying experience. I flew for thirty-four years, and you know the old saying, "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots." And just to show you where I fit into that, I quit flying when I was seventy­six years old, so you can see I was not a bold pilot. But in those thirty-four years, I had a ball, because I enjoyed flying a great deal, and, as I say, that helped me a great deal in visiting undergraduate schools, contacts with bar organizations around the country, and so forth, you see. 
Yes, I did a fair amount of flying. As a matter of fact, I quit flying when I was seventy-six years old. I still had my current physical ticket, I still had my current proficiency ticket. You're examined every two years for flight proficiency. I was current in all those things, but I finally decided that enough was enough, I ought to quit while I was ahead. So I gave it up at seventy-six. Warren: And you're here to tell the tale. Steinheimer: That's right. But I enjoyed every minute of it. As I say, it really was invaluable to me, the flying, to do the things I had to do. Warren: Would you go alone, or would anyone else from the school go with you? Steinheimer: I occasionally took faculty with me on certain missions, but normally these were things that I did by myself. I flew a lot of hours by myself. As a matter of fact, I ended up with a little over five thousand solo hours as pilot-in-command of 
my aircraft. That's quite a few hours. Warren: Wow. I dare say. Well, I see we're about at the end of the tape. Is there anything you'd like to say at the end of this interview? Steinheimer: No, I think you've done a good job of trying to cover these things better than I have done in responding. [End of interview] 
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