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Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–45.Back to highlights
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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1840s
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Samuel F. Phillips opens a law practice in Chapel Hill
Phillips, who had grown up in Chapel Hill after his family moved there in 1826, studied law under President David L. Swain and in the new university law school, then began practising in Chapel Hill when he came of age in 1845.
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William Horn Battle becomes the university's professor of law
After teaching law from his office in Chapel Hill, Battle was professor of law at the university by 1845, and the university began offering the bachelor of law degree.
- 1850s
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Samuel F. Phillips teaches in the university law school
From 1854 to 1859 Phillips taught in the university law school at Chapel Hill.
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Samuel F. Phillips closes his law school and shares the office with Judge Battle
Phillips, who had taught law in his Franklin Street office since 1854, closed the school, went back to practice, and shared the building with Judge William Horn Battle.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1870s
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William Horn Battle returns to Chapel Hill to teach law
Battle had left for Raleigh in 1868 when Reconstruction politics disrupted the university. When his law school reopened at Chapel Hill in January 1877, while his son Kemp was president, he returned as professor of law, and he taught until he resigned in January 1879, shortly before his death that March.
- 1880s
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John Manning teaches law at the university
Elected professor of law in 1881, John Manning taught at Chapel Hill while keeping a private practice, and law enrollment grew from seven students to eighty-seven by 1897-98.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1910s
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Walter Clark helps teach the university's Summer Law School
Chief Justice Walter Clark assisted in the university's Summer Law School, which enrolled thirty-seven students.
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Margaret Berry becomes the first woman to graduate from UNC's law school
Margaret Berry of the Hillsborough Berry family, who had finished her UNC undergraduate degree in 1913, graduated from the university's law school in 1915, the first woman to do so. That summer she passed the state bar examination, listed as Margaret Kollock Berry of Orange.
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Oscar Efird organizes the Law School Association
Law teacher Oscar Ogburn Efird turned the school's loose moot courts into appellate-style law clubs under a Law School Association. It faded after he left the next year.
- 1920s
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Murphey, Saunders and Manning halls are designed in the university's building office
On the east side of the new south quadrangle, H. P. Alan Montgomery, architect in the university's building office under Thomas C. Atwood, laid out a smaller court of classroom buildings, with McKim, Mead and White as consulting architects: Murphey Hall for languages and literature, Saunders Hall (now Carolina Hall) for history and social science, and Manning Hall, with an Ionic portico and cupola, for the law school.
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The law school moves to a three-year course with new entrance rules
By the end of 1922 the law curriculum had become a three-year course of study with new admission requirements, part of Dean Lucius McGehee's effort to meet American Bar Association standards.
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University trustees name the new law building for John Manning
At their June 13, 1922 meeting the university trustees approved naming the new law building for John Manning. The School of Law moved into Manning Hall before the fall 1923 semester.
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Albert Coates joins the law faculty at Chapel Hill
Coates, a university graduate with a Harvard law degree, joined the law faculty in 1923. The schools he ran for police officers and sheriffs grew into the Institute of Government.
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Law dean Lucius McGehee dies
McGehee, dean since 1910 and the man who brought the casebook method to Chapel Hill, broke down weeks before the fall term and died in Richmond in early October. Atwell C. McIntosh became acting dean, and the trustees gave his estate $2,000 for burial and debts.
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Albert Coates revives the Law School Association
Coates brought back Efird's association and used it to bring state supreme court justices, judges and lawyers to Manning Hall to lecture, to run moot courts across all three classes, and later to equip a model law office.
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Trustees adopt higher law school standards over Governor Morrison's objection
At a four-hour meeting in the governor's office, attended by about half the trustees, 45 of them lawyers, Morrison argued against stiffer entrance rules, but a voice vote approved Chase's plans. The board put off naming a dean rather than accept Chase's out-of-state choice.
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Trustees elect Merton L. Ferson dean of the law school
Ferson, an Iowan who had been law dean at Washington University in St. Louis, won with three times the votes of his nearest rival, ending months of resistance from trustees who wanted a North Carolinian.
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Manning Hall is dedicated as the law school's new home
Supreme court justices, superior court judges, lawyers and alumni, 200 or more, came for the dedication and lunched at the new Carolina Inn with John Sprunt Hill as host.
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Chase keeps Albert Coates with a raise and tenure
After Coates collapsed from exhaustion in June 1926 and sent Chase a private resignation, Chase gave him a pay raise and tenure as professor of law, and Coates was teaching again that fall.
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Susie Sharp enters the law school as the only woman in her class
Sharp was the only woman among sixty first-year law students and met harassment in her early weeks. She later became the first woman superior court judge in North Carolina and chief justice of the state supreme court.
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Charles T. McCormick becomes dean of the law school
Merton L. Ferson had left in 1926 for the Cincinnati deanship, and the man Chase hired to replace him backed out months before the fall term. Chase then named McCormick, on the faculty only a year. The trustees consented but not unanimously, and James A. Gray Jr. moved that they be consulted before the next dean was chosen.
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First-year law students protest Coates's failing grades
Coates failed fifteen of fifty-two students in personal property and gave seven more Es. Class leaders including Dan K. Moore pressed him to grade on a curve and talked of a boycott; he kept the grades but gave a new examination.
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A model law office and courtroom are fitted out in Manning Hall
Through the Law School Association, Coates had lawyers around the state pay for a model courtroom and a practice law office stocked with real forms, so students could join theory to practice. Coates had put $2,600 of his own money into the office over four years.
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Coates holds a Law School Association conference on criminal justice
About thirty lawyers, judges and state officials, including Attorney General D. G. Brummitt and Justices George W. Connor and Willis J. Brogden, met at the law school and split up sections of the American Law Institute model code to begin a new state code of criminal procedure.
- 1930s
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Coates and law dean Van Hecke withdraw their resignations after meeting with President Graham
That spring law dean Maurice T. Van Hecke had recommended that Coates stop teaching and work only for the Institute, and first Coates and then Van Hecke offered to resign. At a June 6 meeting in Graham's South Building office both stayed on: Coates got a fall leave and a second chance in the law school, and he agreed to stop presenting the law school or the university as the Institute's sponsor.
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Graham refuses to move Albert Coates out of the law school
In May 1935 Dean Van Hecke reported that Coates's teaching had failed again and, with the whole law faculty behind him, asked that Coates be freed from law school duties to run the Institute. Coates threatened to demand an academic trial; Graham declined the transfer and again refused Van Hecke's offer to resign, and Coates rejoined the law faculty in February 1936 and taught there for thirty years.
- 1940s
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Henry P. Brandis Jr. joins the UNC law faculty
After two state tax posts, Brandis, the Institute of Government's first full-time staff member, joined the university's law school faculty in 1940. He became its dean in 1949 and a Graham Kenan Professor of Law in 1965, and retired in 1972.
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Robert H. Wettach serves as dean of the UNC School of Law
Wettach, who also served as an assistant state attorney general, lived with his wife Alpha in the rented Nash house on South Boundary Street.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Henry Brandis becomes dean of the UNC law school
Brandis, the Institute's first associate director, was promoted from professor of law to dean in 1949. Under him the law school and the Institute drew closer, with Institute staff teaching Coates's classes when he was away.
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Black law students sue to enter UNC's Law School
On October 25, 1949, Harold Epps and other law students at North Carolina College in Durham sued for admission to UNC's law school. A federal district court ruled against them on October 9, 1950, but the Fourth Circuit reversed on March 27, 1951, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the university's appeal on June 4, 1951.
- 1950s
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Dean Brandis handles the applications of Pauli Murray and three other Black students to the law school
After the trustees left admissions to each professional school's dean, Brandis wrote Chancellor R. B. House about four Black applicants, Pauli Murray, J. Kenneth Lee, Harvey E. Beech and William C. Chance Jr., and on June 6 told Murray the school offered no graduate law courses. The UNC Libraries exhibit reads these letters as showing the law school resisting integration.
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UNC Law School begins desegregation
About a week after the Supreme Court refused on June 4, 1951, to review McKissick v. Carmichael, Black students registered for summer session at UNC's law school, the first African Americans to enroll at the university. UNC Law names them as Harvey E. Beech, James L. Lassiter, J. Kenneth Lee, Floyd B. McKissick and James R. Walker.
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Harvey Beech and J. Kenneth Lee graduate from UNC's law school
A year after they entered as the first Black students at UNC's law school, Harvey Beech and J. Kenneth Lee received their law degrees. UNC also lists James Robert Walker among the 1952 graduates.
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Moses C. Burt Jr. is one of the first three Black students admitted to UNC law as first-year students
Moses C. Burt Jr., son of Orange County farm agent Moses Burt and Ridge Road principal Alethea Burt, entered the UNC School of Law in fall 1955 as one of the first three African American students admitted straight into its first-year class. Three other Black students who enrolled that fall transferred from other programs.
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Daniel H. Pollitt joins the UNC law faculty
Pollitt came to the UNC School of Law in 1957 as an associate professor of constitutional and labor law, after resigning from the University of Arkansas rather than sign an oath disavowing membership in the NAACP.
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The law faculty and the Institute staff vote against merging the Institute into the law school
When Albert Coates pressed again to fold the Institute of Government into the UNC law school, both the law faculty and the Institute's own staff voted the idea down. Assistant director John Sanders warned that the Institute's service work would be subordinated to the law school and its identity lost.
- 1960s
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Julius Chambers graduates first in his class from the UNC School of Law
Chambers graduated first in his class from the University's School of Law in Chapel Hill in 1962. He went on to practice civil rights law in Charlotte.
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Law dean Henry Brandis Jr. turns down Albert Coates's last appeal for a merger
Coates sent Dean Henry Brandis Jr. a pleading letter with thirty-nine pages of enclosures urging that the Institute become part of the law school. Brandis refused to reopen the question and said that once Coates returned to full-time teaching, Institute staff would no longer teach his courses, since their part had weakened the school's instruction.
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The UNC law school dedicates an issue of the North Carolina Law Review to Albert Coates
When Coates gave up full-time teaching in 1967, the law school marked it by dedicating the November 1967 North Carolina Law Review to him. That year the North Carolina Bar Association also gave him its John J. Parker award, and Governor Dan K. Moore presented him the North Carolina Award.
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UNC's new law school building is finished on South Road
A new building for the UNC School of Law was completed across South Road in 1968, part of the decade's boom of modernist construction along that street.
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Albert Coates speaks at the law school graduation after teaching his last class
Recovering from his stroke, Coates gave the law school's commencement address and told the graduates that they and he were leaving together, since he had taught his final class. It ended a law teaching career at Chapel Hill that began in 1923.
- 1970s
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Charles E. Daye joins the UNC School of Law as its first Black tenure-track professor
Charles E. Daye, a Durham native, came to the UNC law faculty in 1972 from Covington & Burling as the school's first African American tenure-track professor. He taught torts, housing and community development and administrative advocacy, and advised the Black Law Students Association from 1972 until 2014.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 1990s
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Daniel Pollitt retires from the UNC law faculty
Pollitt, by then a Kenan professor of law, retired from teaching in 1992 after more than 35 years at UNC. The Daily Tar Heel credited him with founding the North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, opposing the Speaker Ban and helping to integrate the university.
- 2000s
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UNC's School of Law founds the Center for Civil Rights with Julius Chambers as its first director
The UNC School of Law established the Center for Civil Rights in Chapel Hill in 2001, with Julius Chambers as its first director, Dean Gene Nichol, and John Charles Boger as deputy director. The center worked on inequalities facing minority and low-income communities.
- 2020s
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UNC School of Law dedicates a portrait of Charles E. Daye
The law school held a virtual dedication for a commissioned portrait of Professor Emeritus Charles E. Daye by the Durham artist William Paul Thomas, attended by close to 300 people. The portrait hangs on the fifth floor of Van Hecke-Wettach Hall.
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