HOGUE: Who was the first one hired anyway?

LANIER: Yeah, I can claim primacy of honor on that. I'm not really sure it's such a distinction,

but I had been on the faculty here at Georgia State since 1977, and I'd point out to you that last

Saturday was my 30 th anniversary sitting at basically the same desk.

So when the law school began the discussions of the law school and the political interaction

between the legislature and the Board of Regents took place, I was actually here.

In the spring of that year, February or March, because it was, of course, in the summer when

the Johnny-come-latelies finally appeared -

HOGUE: Is he referring to us?

LANIER: I'm referring to you and the four others who were in the first faculty.

BROSS: The non-natives.

LANIER: Yeah, that's true.

HOGUE: Well, Ben was working on the law school, but he was still at Emory because I met him in the spring of 1981. That's how I came to know Ben.

BROSS: And he was the person we had to depend on to come to a new city. When he brought us in,

there was nothing but wreckage on the first floor and

the assurance that it was going to turn into a law school real soon now.

HOGUE: Right. I remember Mary Roberts took a picture. I still have that picture.

It's just the front of the building and it said "College of Law."

And I said, "I'm not going to sign a contract until I see some tangible evidence that there's really going to be a law school."

LANIER: Because as Jim said, we just went on faith. I mean, you had -

BROSS: We went on Ben. We really relied on Ben.

HOGUE: That's right. He brought a kind of instant credibility because he had a track record in legal education.

He had a track record at the legislature and just was a known quantity in Georgia .

LANIER: No doubt about it. This is probably the best decision that could have been made for the law school at that point in our history.

BROSS: There was a lot of wishful thinking involved in the early days of the law school about

how much of a budget it would take and how hard it was going to be.

That's what we old English majors would call the "willing suspension of disbelief" [laughter]

because they thought they could start a law school for $2 million.

LANIER: I don't know if they were serious about that figure even at that point in time.

HOGUE: There was never enough money and the funding of the law school was basically wrung out of the rest of the university -

LANIER: That's exactly right.

HOGUE: - which earned us some enmity that lasted for decades, really.

LANIER: Well, you make a good point, though. There was no independent funding for the law school.

No money had been appropriated by the legislature. Everything we had, had to be taken from somebody

else inside the university. And Ben was an absolute apostle of the fact that we should be grateful

to everyone else in the university because without their forbearance, without their tolerance,

we simply would have had no space, no budget, no personnel, no books, no nothing.

HOGUE: And no law school.

LANIER: And no law school.

HOGUE: Jim and I were reflecting the other day on the way that in the first couple of years

when Ben was dean, we basically ate lunch together every single day.

BROSS: That's true.

HOGUE: It was like every lunchtime was a faculty meeting.

BROSS: Faculty did the administration at this place for a very long time.

HOGUE: What I remember about that was when I was associate dean - we're now moved ahead a little bit

- and I remember you came into my office one day and every time you came in, I always thought I'd done something wrong.

And Jim said, "Is it true?" He started out, "Is it true that we allow evening students to enroll in the day and day students to enroll in the evening?"

And I thought, "My God, there's some ABA rule that I've overlooked and I'm toast." And I said, "Yes."

And he said, "That's great. We're going to publicize that," and marched out of my office. Do you remember that?

BROSS: Yeah, we made it into a virtue. We said, "Our program has all of these flexible choices," after I found out that we did.

HOGUE: Which a lot of programs don't.

LANIER: But in terms of the question of whether any of us ever doubted that this institution would be a success, I never entertained a shadow of a doubt.

HOGUE: Nor did I.

LANIER: It never seemed to be even within the realm of possibility.

I may have had some questions about how rapidly we could move toward being a mature law school,

but I never questioned the success of this place, especially after the first year class was in

because they were a special group of people.

HOGUE: They were.

BROSS: They were adventurous in a way that -

LANIER: They were pioneers.

HOGUE: They were willing to take a risk and in fact, until we got provisional accreditation, they were at risk.

But we have a great future, I think. I think that we're pretty solidly planted.

The future is just bright from here on out, I think.

BROSS: We managed to get to something like maturity without ever going through adolescence.

I don't know how we managed that. [laughter]

LANIER: That was kind of the great leap forward.

HOGUE: We were too old to go through adolescence.

LANIER: In a real sense, though, I think it's important to keep in mind that even

the faculty that's here now and the students who are here now are really in a sense, founders.

I mean, we are still a young institution with miles to go.

BROSS: And we have a dean who is close to a founder. I mean, the first in-house permanent dean,

as opposed to acting dean, was somebody who came after the third year of the law school.

LANIER: That's true. Do you know who hired him, who interviewed him first?

BROSS: Yeah, I know.

HOGUE: Okay, I just don't want that to be forgotten.

[laughter]

BROSS: You weren't going to tape for that, were you?

[laughter]