My wife and I are currently completing our estate plan. The reason we chose to make OCU Law a beneficiary is to say “thank you” to an institution from which I have received much more than I could ever possibly repay.
I see this with more clarity over the last several months. I was recently representing a client in a matter concerning a license agreement for real estate. Among my reference tools was The Law of Easements and Licenses in Land. One of the co-authors was Jon W. Bruce, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Law at Vanderbilt University. Professor Bruce was my instructor in Property during my first year in law school at OCU. I communicated with him, and in his generosity, he provided me with the most recent volume of his treatise and personally autographed it to me.
I was asked to judge a Moot Court Argument at my undergraduate Alma Mater, Susquehanna University. The case to be argued is the current case of Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, before the Supreme Court of the United States. The issue is whether a State has authority to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes against Indians in Indian Country. I will be thinking of my professor in my third year of law school, Maurice Hitchcock Merrill, late Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Oklahoma and Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Law at Oklahoma City University. The course was entitled “Advanced Constitutional Law and Seminar on the Judiciary in Oklahoma.” Dr. Merrill explained, with thoroughness, the jurisprudence of Tribal Law, a subject with which, as a Pennsylvanian, I was totally unfamiliar. It was very gratifying to return to Susquehanna for the oral argument, knowing that I was taught the subject matter of the argument by a recognized national expert.
I am very grateful to Oklahoma City University School of Law and to those who taught me there. Having been admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, I continue to use the knowledge received from OCU Law every day of my professional life for the last 44 years.