By SCOTT TAYLOR HARTZELL
Published September 15, 2004
GULFPORT - On Sunday, Stetson University College of Law will have served the area for 50 years.
During the institution's opening ceremonies in 1954, acting dean Charles J. Hilkey observed: "Just as the first half of the century produced leaders of science, the second half of the century must produce leaders of men."
Six Florida Supreme Court justices have been Stetson graduates. The college is annually hailed as the nation's best graduate school in trial advocacy competition.
"We're still looking for leaders," said professor and dean emeritus Bruce Jacob, whose class of 1959 had 48 students.
In 1948, Dr. John Edmunds, president of Stetson University in DeLand, warned that the law school was dying. By 1954, the oldest law school in Florida had to relocate or lose accreditation.
Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando courted the law school. In three weeks, a committee headed by B.E. Webb "secured $100,000 from 200 (mostly St. Petersburg) citizens and firms," the St. Petersburg Times reported.
For $200,000, the college moved to Gulfport's former Rolyat Hotel - owned by Union Trust Co. and appraised then at more than $1-million.
Modeled after the Spanish Great Court and opened in 1926, I.M. "Handsome Jack" Taylor's hotel was "an 18th century fusion of the Spanish and the Moor," All Florida magazine said. In 1932, The Florida Military Academy took over the site at 61st Street and 15th Avenue S.
When the law school opened on Sept. 19, 1954, former Gov. Doyle E. Carlton asked a crowd of 500 not to dedicate, "but to rededicate the Stetson Law School . . . under the motto "For God and Truth.' "
Jacob, 69, dean of the law school from 1981 to 1994, said "there were five or six full-time faculty then." (Today, 53 full-time faculty and 49 adjuncts serve.)
In 1955, Florida Supreme Court Justice Harold L. Sebring replaced Hilkey. Sebring served as a judge on Nuremberg's Nazi war tribunals. As dean, he enticed benefactors and launched a campus expansion program.
Tuition by 1959 was $250 a semester. (Today's full-time tuition is $24,940 for fall/spring). The one classroom in 1959 has become six, with four courtrooms and six seminar rooms.
Along with professor Paul Barnard in 1962, Sebring established public defender clinics, which trained students under the auspices of a practicing attorney.
Stetson's first full-time female law professor, Ruth F. Thurman, experienced "good-natured ribbing" as the sole woman in Stetson's June 1963 graduating class. Deans Richard T. Dillon, Jacob, Lizabeth Moody and W. Gary Vause followed Sebring, who served until 1968. Darby Dickerson currently heads the college.
This fall, there are nearly 740 full-time and about 180 part-time students. Twenty-five percent of the 371 new fall students are minorities; 55 percent are women. "We've done fabulously well," said professor Thomas C. Marks Jr., Class of '63. "We're diverse. Liberals. Conservatives. We're a great mix. We're a family."
