Happy 10th Anniversary to us!

by Heather Kushnerick, Special Collections Librarian

The Fred Parks Law Library opened in 2001, and in the past 10 years a lot of things have changed. We’ve increased our print collection, gotten a multitude of fantastic databases, added digital collections, and built up our Special Collections. Our Special Collections consist of the library’s rare book collection, manuscript collections, and the college archive. These are closed stacks collections that may be accessed by appointment with the Special Collections Librarian. The preservation and the security of collections are ongoing concerns for the library. Items from Special Collections are not eligible for interlibrary loan and must be used in the Jones Reading Room under the supervision of library staff. Currently, the oldest item in Rare Book Collection dates from 1481 – that’s a mere 29 years after the Printing Revolution began with Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.

The Rare Book Collection consists of items considered too old, rare, valuable or fragile to be housed in the main collection. We focus on Texas legal history, Texana, Houston history, Mexican and Spanish law, and seminal works in legal history, particularly those dealing with Common Law. Items from Special Collections are placed on exhibit 3 to 4 times a year in an effort to promote the collection. Since 2011 is the year of our 10th anniversary, we have purchased some real gems in honor of this milestone. On display now in the library lobby is an exhibition featuring some of our most recent acquisitions, including a Spanish and Catalan edition of the Consolato del Mare, a study on Siete Partidas, a sixteenth century work on legal theory, a Spanish treatise on criminal procedure (which includes a section on the use of torture on both witnesses and the accused), a Spanish naval treatise addressing international law written at the time of the American Revolution, and a volume containing primary sources in Texas legal history. This exhibition will be up through September.


For more information on the Special Collections Department, please contact Heather Kushnerick at hkushnerick@stcl.edu.

Revised California budget softens blow for schools [Sacramento Bee, 5/18/11]: Largely because of rosier revenue projections for the coming year, budget experts at the Capitol say schools gained a cushion against cuts – even if Brown fails in his effort to extend 2009 increases to income taxes.


Teacher: ‘My employer has become my enemy’ [Washington Post, 5/18/11]: A library media educator in Los Angeles who blogs under the name Mizz Murphy wrote a powerful, first-person account of hearings being held by the Los Angeles Unified School District for teachers and others who who have received a Reduction in Force notice and are trying to keep their jobs.

Fensterwald: Big (invisible) boost in K-12 spending [Educated Guess, 5/17/11]: Gov. Jerry Brown gave K-12 school districts significantly more money, tempered by conflicting messages and sober warnings in the May Revision budget he presented on Monday.

Federal plan would expand school year – as California's shrinks [California Watch, 5/17/11]: Even as school districts around California are shrinking their school year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Washington is trying to push states to move in the opposite direction.

Fensterwald: Big (invisible) boost in K-12 spending [Educated Guess, 5/17/11]: Gov. Jerry Brown gave K-12 school districts significantly more money, tempered by conflicting messages and sober warnings in the May Revision budget he presented on Monday.

Baron: It’s not business, it’s personal [Thoughts on Public Education, 5/16/11]: It’s a measure of how worried and angry people are that nearly a hundred parents, students, educators, and policy makers gave up their Saturday to learn just how badly schools will be hit under Gov. Brown’s all-cuts budget, due out today, and to discuss some of the not-so popular solutions.

Oakland Unified becomes a cautionary tale for state takeovers in California [Oakland Tribune, 5/13/11]: Eight years after the Oakland school district's financial meltdown and state takeover, the local school board can't seem to shake past mistakes -- including some made by the state agency tasked with restoring its fiscal health. The story of the Richmond (now West Contra Costa County) school district is here.
Teacher layoffs out of sync with budget impasse [California Watch, 5/13/11]: Thousands of California teachers will receive final layoff notices by a state-imposed deadline of May 15, even though school districts are still in the dark about their financial status in the coming school year.

Opinion: Tobar: The disgraceful interrogation of L.A. school librarians [Los Angeles Times, 5/13/11]: If state education cuts are drastic, the librarians' only chance of keeping a paycheck is to prove they're qualified to be switched to classroom teaching. So LAUSD attorneys grill them. I've seen a lot of strange things in two decades as a reporter, but nothing quite as disgraceful and weird as this inquisition the LAUSD is inflicting upon more than 80 school librarians.

Family Claims H.S. Principal Went Ballistic [Courthouse News, 5/10/11]: A Clovis West High School student says high school officials had police arrest and interrogate him, then suspended him for 15 days for logging onto a Facebook page that parodied the school's principal. He says he didn't create the parody, and never logged onto the Facebook page with school computers, or during school hours or on school property.

Performance-based teacher layoff bill dies in committee [Los Angeles Times, 5/12/11]: California legislation calling for creation of teacher ratings for use in layoff decisions instead of seniority fails to win enough votes to move forward.

Shorter school year? [Inland County Bulletin, 5/10/11]: California's ongoing budget crisis could result in 20 days being cut from public schools' academic year. No legislative proposal exists, but Gov. Jerry Brown and school officials recently warned that shutting down school one month early - 20 instructional days - is a real possibility next year without an extension of higher taxes.

U.S. schools chief backs off on publication of teacher ratings [California Watch, 5/10/11]: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has tempered his initial enthusiasm for publishing teacher effectiveness ratings based on test scores.

Times updates and expands value-added ratings for Long Angeles elementary school teachers [Los Angeles Times, 5/8/11]: New data include ratings for about 11,500 teachers, nearly double the number covered last August. School and civic leaders had sought to halt release of the data. The Daily News has a story also.

High bar for firing kept Sacramento teacher on paid leave for 14 months [Sacramento Bee, 5/8/11]: Each letter arrived differently over the course of four years: by mail, by hand and a third by email.

Teachers Union Objects To L.A. School District's New Evaluation Plan [Los Angeles Times, 5/7/11]: The union representing Los Angeles teachers is pursuing a legal challenge to a key early step in creating a new teacher evaluation system that includes the use of student scores on standardized tests, union officials said Friday.

Pension Study: Teachers' Benefits Are Modest [Ventura Star, 5/7/11]: An economic research firm hired to produce data that could justify an expected initiative campaign to scale back public-employee pensions uncovered what its authors called a surprising finding in its report issued this week: Teachers receive relatively modest pensions and contribute a sizable chunk of their earnings to fund their retirement benefits.

Court Upholds Teacher Firing Over Computer Porn [School Law Blog, 5/5/11]: A federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a Wisconsin high school teacher for accessing pornographic images on his school computer, rejecting his claims that his school district retaliated against him for teachers' union activism. The case, from the 7th Circuit, is Zellner v. Herrick.
You can read a blurb about the case from Wired.com's "Threat Level" blog (5/5/11).

School free speech fight [Stockton Record, 5/5/11]: A Bear Creek High teacher is fighting for her students' freedom of speech after the school's principal requested to preview the monthly Bruin Voice newspaper prior to publication.

California weighs shorter school year as budgets wane [Sacramento Bee, 5/4/11]: Children in frigid areas have "snow day" school closures. Could students across sunny California face "budget days" in bad fiscal times?

Fensterwald: Most of 13 parcel taxes passed [Thoughts on Public Education, 5/4/11]: If the threshold for passing a parcel tax were 55 percent, as Sen. Joe Simitian and fellow Democrats in the Legislature favor, a baker’s dozen parcel taxes would have passed on Tuesday. Instead, four fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, including two that came within 1 percent of winning.

Court of Appeal overturns Commission on Professional Competence: Soliciting Sex on CraigsList evidences unfitness to teach [School Law Blog, 5/5/11].
San Diego Unif. School Dist. v. Com. on Prof. Competence (4th District, 5/3/11): Frank Lampedusa was terminated by San Diego Unified School District which alleged that he showed evident unfitness for service and immoral conduct. Specifically, the charges were based upon Lampedusa's posting on Craigslist of an ad soliciting sex that contained graphic photos of his genitalia and anus, as well as obscene written text, that was discovered by a parent and reported to the District. The Commission on Professional Competence reinstated Lamedusa, determining that cause for the dismissal did not exist and reinstating Lampedusa's employment. The Court of Appeal overturned the Commission finding there is no substantial evidence to support the Commission's decision as the evidence shows both evident unfitness to serve as a teacher and that Lampedusa engaged in immoral conduct, either of which constituted grounds for termination.

Educating students in remote areas can be costly [California Watch, 5/3/11]: In some very small schools in remote parts of California, the state is paying about $200,000 per student to educate them.

School Districts Call in Cavalry of Consultants to Push Parcel Taxes [Bay Citizen, 4/29/11]: Bay Area school districts, facing increasingly severe budget problems, are turning en masse to one of the few revenue-raising tools at their disposal: the parcel tax.

Walnut Creek man says school ignored son's bullying [Contra Costa Times, 4/26/11]: A Walnut Creek man says bullies on a school football field injured his son -- and that the school has done little about it. Walter Yuhre's formal complaint against the Acalanes Union High School District says administrators did nothing to prevent or stop the bullying and became indifferent after it occurred.

Teach For America seeks critical mass [Thoughts On Public Education, 4/26/11]: There was a point last week during Wendy Kopp’s appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley that smacked of the sort of smugness that, I suspect, makes some veteran teachers cringe when Teach For America (TFA) is mentioned.

Districts Consider Even Shorter School Year [California Watch, 4/26/11]: The likelihood is growing that many school districts will have to cut the number of days students spend in class in response to the state's deepening budget crisis, according to state education leaders and experts.

Court Backs Discipline of Student Over Internet Speech [School Law Blog, 4/25/11]: In a case raising novel issues about student speech rights in the Internet era, a federal appeals court has upheld the discipline of a Connecticut student who had harshly criticized school officials in her Web journal.
Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center comments. The case is Doninger v. Niehoff.

Book Review

Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice
By Gary M. Lavergne
University of Texas Press, 354 pages

Reviewed by Stuart Stern
South Texas College of Law
Office of Development & Alumni Relations

The Postman Cometh: The Integration of UT School of Law

South Texas students are undoubtedly familiar with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the two most well-known legal cases affecting the racial composition of public schools in the United States. But few, I’d venture, have heard of Sweatt v. Painter (1950). Yet this Texas case was called “the big one” by none other than Thurgood Marshall, who argued both Sweatt and Brown before the U.S. Supreme Court—and won each of them. For Sweatt, which was heard by the Court in 1950, resulted in the desegregation of the University of Texas School of Law and paved the way for Brown four years later.

In his engrossing book Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice, Gary M. Lavergne presents the stories of plaintiff Sweatt, a black Houstonian, and his attorney Marshall, the star counsel of the NAACP, and depicts the painstaking groundwork that was laid by Marshall and his legal team to achieve victory in the landmark case. (The Painter they opposed was acting UT president Theophilus S. Painter.)

Heman Marion Sweatt was what we would today term a second-career student, which adds to the impressiveness of his accomplishment and makes him an intriguing figure. Sweatt was a thirty-seven-year-old mailman with a wife, an undergraduate degree in biology earned sixteen years previously, and a house on Delano Street in the Third Ward. In one of the ironies of the case, Sweatt, who said he wanted to be a lawyer when he applied, in 1946, for admission to UT, had originally wanted to be a doctor. But it was Sweatt who had stood up, when no one else did, at an NAACP meeting in a neighborhood church the previous fall to volunteer to be the plaintiff in a law school–desegregation suit the association was planning to file. He would later describe this turning point in civil rights history as a “brash moment.”

Lavergne, a UT Austin administrator and the author of four previous books, leads us up to this moment with his meticulous descriptions of a variety of interrelated historical threads: the history of public higher education in Texas, including the funding of both UT and Texas A&M through the profits of a very bountiful oil field; the history of the NAACP, including that of its outspoken Texas branches; the cases the NAACP took on in Texas prior to Sweatt to desegregate the state’s Democratic-primary elections (the only primaries held at the time); and the nature of life in both Houston and Austin during the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which the black and white citizens in each of these cities were rigidly divided by the racial caste system of the times.

Despite the segregation that characterized Austin, the UT campus itself during the 1940s and ’50s showed the first glimmers of open-mindedness that would later come to symbolize the capital city. The student newspaper, The Daily Texan, “exhibited a surprising liberalism,” according to one black educator. Following the denial by President Painter of Sweatt’s application to UT, a group of students formed an all-white campus branch of the NAACP. And two years later, in 1948, according to Lavergne, “UT polls indicated that nearly six in ten students approved of the desegregation of their campus, especially the graduate and professional schools.”

That wouldn’t happen, however, for another two years. Sweatt v. Painter went from the 126th District Court, in Austin, in 1946 to the Third Court of Civil Appeals, also in Austin, in 1947. The following year, the Texas Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and in November of 1949 it went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The following April, the Court heard oral arguments in Sweatt, and two months later, in June of 1950, issued a unanimous verdict in favor of the plaintiff.

In the meantime, the state of Texas had attempted to conform to the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson by providing more funds for Prairie View A&M University and, in 1947, establishing the Prairie View Law School, in downtown Houston (which generated no applicants); the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), in Houston (which generated 2,300 applicants and immediately became the largest African-American university in the South); and the School of Law of the Texas State University for Negroes, in Austin (which enrolled three students).

Although TSU became known as “the House that Sweatt Built,” Sweatt refused to attend either its makeshift law school, which consisted of four rooms in an Austin office building, or the Prairie View Law School, which comprised three rooms in a Houston office building. He was determined to go to UT, and the Supreme Court agreed that he should. In its ruling, the Court stated:

Whether the University of Texas Law School is compared with the original or the new law school for Negroes, we cannot find substantial equality in the educational opportunities offered white and Negro law students by the State. In terms of the number of faculty, variety of courses and opportunity for specialization, size of the student body, scope of the library, availability of law review and similar activities, the University of Texas Law School is superior. . . .

What is more important, the University of Texas Law School possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school . . . [including the] reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige. It is difficult to believe that one who had a free choice between these law schools would consider the question close.

Heman Sweatt began classes at UT School of Law in September of 1950, and I will leave it to the reader to explore the bittersweet denouement of his complex story. Of significant note is that the portion of the UT campus known as the Little Campus, located at 19th and Red River streets, was renamed the Heman Sweatt Campus in 1988, and that the courthouse where his case was originally heard was renamed the Heman Marion Sweatt Travis County Courthouse in 2005.