BYU law school's miraculous 50-year journey

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Utah Business

An opening in the president’s chair at Brigham Young University in 1971 coincided with the announcement that the flagship university of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would start a new law school.

President Harold B. Lee decided to interview a highly regarded professor from the prestigious University of Chicago law school about both of the changes.

The law school was a bad idea, the presidential candidate said. But President Dallin H. Oaks got the BYU job. And he also inherited the legitimate problems he’d seen in launching a law school.

“I was not in favor of the law school because as an experienced legal educator, I was realistic about what it would take to have a first-class law school,” says President Oaks, who now holds the exact same position today that President Lee did then — first counselor in the First Presidency and vice chair of the BYU board of trustees.

“I knew that the church couldn’t afford to have a law school unless it was first rate, and I was skeptical that we could do it,” he says, in an extended interview with the Deseret News.

There was the problem of hiring the faculty, finding a dean, recruiting students, acquiring a law library and achieving accreditation.

President Oaks and his associates overcame all these hurdles and more to make BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School a precocious member of the top 25 in the latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings.

Most top law schools were founded in the 1800s, and, in fact, all but two of the report’s top 28 schools were founded before 1910 — UCLA in 1949 and BYU in 1973.

Sister Kathleen J. Eyring, wife of President Henry B. Eyring, dies at age 82 following a life of deep conviction to the gospel

After consecrating her life, talents and great spiritual maturity to her family and the gospel of Jesus Christ, Sister Kathleen Johnson Eyring, 82 — the wife of President Henry B. Eyring, second counselor in the First Presidency — died Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023, in her home in Bountiful, Utah, surrounded by her family.

“Everything I’ve done in the Church, my marriage to Hal, any call I’ve accepted, I have done with deep conviction that Joseph Smith is a prophet, the Church is true, the Church is led by prophets, and the priesthood is restored and is upon the earth,” Sister Eyring said in a Church News interview when her husband was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Throughout their 60-plus years of marriage and President Eyring’s close to 40 years of full-time Church service, Sister Eyring remained her husband’s biggest support, counselor and confidante.

In recent years, President Eyring made mention of his wife’s declining health. In a Church News interview in 2023, President Eyring said that although she could no longer speak, she would sometimes offer a smile, as if to say, “We’re still in this together.”

Throughout their marriage, President Eyring said, he always got the feeling that his wife’s first priority was to try to do what the Lord wanted.

Funeral services are pending.

Read more about Sister Eyring's life.

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