Annette E. Clark has published “What’s Past Is Prologue”: The Story of the Sale of the University of Puget Sound School of Law to Seattle University, in the Seattle University Law Review:
When the Seattle University Law Review editorial staff invited me to write an updated history of the Seattle University School of Law in honor of our 50th anniversary, I planned to start the narrative with the year 1989, which was where the prior written history (authored by former Law Library Director Anita Steele and published by the Law Review) had left off. It also happens to be the year when I graduated from this law school and joined the tenure-track faculty, so 1989 seemed like a propitious place to begin. However, as I began to do the research necessary to cover the ensuing 33 years of the school’s history, I was drawn over and over again to one particular part of our story: the announcement in 1993 that the University of Puget Sound had sold its law school to Seattle University. In conducting my research, I came to realize that as others from the law school have moved on, retired, or passed away, I am the lone remaining faculty member who was here for that remarkable period in our history. Thus, in commemoration of the law school’s half-century mark of existence, I have chosen to travel back in time to the defining moment on November 8, 1993, when everything changed. While 1972 marked the law school’s founding, the announcement of the sale in 1993 was the critical inflection point that started us on a difficult but fascinating journey to where we are in this, our 50th year: a vibrant, urban, Jesuit, justice-focused law school, located in the heart of Seattle and at the heart of Seattle University.
--Dan Ernst
