DANIEL MEADOR: SON OF THE SOUTH

The Early Years

Daniel J. Meador was born on December 7, 1926, in Selma, Alabama, and spent his childhood in Greenville, Alabama. After attending The Citadel for one year, he transferred to Auburn University, where he graduated in 1948 with a degree in history. He studied law at the University of Alabama School of Law and graduated in 1951. After graduation, he began practicing law with the firm of Hill, Hill, Stovall and Carter, in Montgomery, Alabama. Two months later, he was called to active duty in the Army.

“I had an ROTC commission.… Went to Fort Bliss, Texas, and then on to San Francisco, with an anti-aircraft unit. And then I …. transferred into the JAGs, and I went to the JAG school in Charlottesville, Virginia, and then on to Korea, where I spent a year trying court-martial cases.”^[1]

After returning from Korea, Meador went to Harvard Law School and received his L.L.M. in 1954. He then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black for one year, and went on to practice law with the firm of Lange, Simpson, Robinson and Somerville in Birmingham, Alabama, for the next two years.

“[W]hen I was in law school, I had a vague notion that I might want to teach someday, but at that stage I was pretty much intent on practice. After I did my graduate work at Harvard and while I was with the U.S. Supreme Court, I still wanted to get into practice but the notion that I might want to teach was growing in my mind.… A year or two with the law firm increased my notion that I wanted to teach, and I finally reached the conclusion that was really the career I wanted, rather than active law practice.”^[2]

In 1957, Meador joined the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he taught for the next eight years. He recalled it as “one of the most interesting periods in my life” and that “it was a really fine group of professors, and the students were all fascinating, and it was an enjoyable period.”^[3] Meador taught civil procedure, legal method, evidence, federal appellate practice, federal courts, and a seminar on constitutional litigation, with the latter three courses “designed to fill a void in our curriculum.”^[4]

In addition to teaching, Meador traveled through the South in 1960 to promote the Law School and was instrumental in implementing the Southeastern Regional Scholarships Program, which provided students with funding for three years.^[5]

Onward to England and Alabama

Meador left the U.S. in 1965 to spend a year in England as a Fulbright Lecturer in Law at the University of Southampton. The American Bar Association commissioned him to study appellate review of criminal court sentences in England in comparison with the appeal of sentences in the United States. For Meador, “the study of sentencing review in England was the highlight of that year.”^[6]

Shortly before leaving for England, Meador received a call from University of Alabama president Frank Rose, inviting him to accept the position as Dean of Alabama Law. After his Fulbright year, Meador returned to the U.S. and became Dean in 1966.^[7]

The deanship at Alabama Law presented Meador with the opportunity to exert a positive influence upon the state’s future during a time of turmoil and adjustment in the state and nation. Meador’s leadership centered around four main components. First, he established a tradition of charitable giving, which helped to promote alumni unity. Meador made use of the Alabama Law Foundation, which was established in 1961 and patterned after the Virginia Law School Foundation. As a corollary, Meador launched a million-dollar fundraising campaign, significantly increasing Alabama Law’s annual funding to more than $400,000.

Second, Meador focused on faculty recruitment. The connections he made during his Fulbright year enabled him to recruit visiting faculty from England and Australia. With the expanded budget, Meador was able to recruit at American Association of Law School meetings and pay for recruiting visits. While he had some success increasing the number of faculty, he observed that it was nonetheless an extremely difficult task during this time as Alabama “was looked on as being backward, unenlightened, and intensely racist.”^[8]

To combat these negative perceptions, Meador sought to modernize and improve Alabama Law’s curriculum, standards, and facilities while enhancing its national visibility. While preserving much of the traditional core curriculum, he revamped the first-year program to include more intense instruction in legal research and writing, and also added a course titled “Introduction to the Legal Process.” Though it resulted in some controversy among faculty, he instituted a new course in procedure, which taught students about the “modern procedural systems used in most of the country,” as the State of Alabama had not yet adopted a unified code of civil procedure, and its courts employed separate systems of common law and equity pleading.^[9] Meador followed the national trend by offering electives to second and especially third-year students, including courses such as: admiralty; comparative law; English legal institutions; legal history; legal reasoning; law and higher education; law and poverty; patent, trademark and copyright law; private international law, and regulation of competition.

To combat these negative perceptions, Meador sought to modernize and improve Alabama Law’s curriculum, standards, and facilities while enhancing its national visibility.

Meador also hired professional librarians who, in assessing the collection and identifying needs, doubled the library’s volume count. In addition, the librarians converted the library’s cataloging system from an older system that had been in use since 1947 to the Library of Congress system.

Finally, Meador made sure that law students at Alabama were exposed to practical matters, initiating a program in appellate advocacy, which required every second-year student to write and argue an appellate brief, and transforming the moot court program from a paltry ten students to a prestigious student-run operation, the John. A. Campbell Moot Court Competition.^[10]

“I see daylight breaking through, and movement in the right direction is clearly perceptible.”

Indeed, the years Meador spent at Alabama Law were a transformative phase in the school’s history. Writing to Ronald Sokol in 1967, Meador said, “I see daylight breaking through, and movement in the right direction is clearly perceptible.”^[11] However, he also noted that he had “been through an unbelievably busy, harassing, frantic, frustrating, and absorbing year.”^[12] Ultimately, due to increasingly widening differences of opinions among Meador, faculty, and administration on the goals for the law school and how those goals would be implemented, Meador resigned as Dean of Alabama Law in 1970.

Returning to UVA Law

That same year, Meador returned to teach at UVA Law after receiving calls from Hardy Cross Dillard and Monrad Paulsen. Meador was offered the James Monroe Professorship Chair, one of the three original professorships at UVA Law, which was created around 1910 along with the James Madison and John B. Minor professorships.^[13] Meador continued to teach procedure and litigation, court structure and jurisdiction of courts. He also became interested in English courts, courts of appeals, and state and federal supreme courts.^[14]

In 1973, he directed the Appellate Justice Project, which was sponsored by the National Center for State Courts, and served on the Advisory Council for Appellate Justice. He also chaired the Courts Task Force of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, and he proposed “four priorities for national action: increasing the speed and efficiency of the court process, upgrading the caliber of the judiciary, improving the performance of the office of Prosecutor and facilitating non-adversary dispositions of cases in a uniform manner.”^[15] One of the Task Force’s main assumptions was “the proposition that cumbersome and protracted litigation of criminal cases blunt the deterrent effect of the criminal law.”^[16]

He was instrumental in the implementation of the flexible exam system at UVA Law, which “could not exist without an honor system.”

Meador was very interested and involved with the University of Virginia Honor System, twice serving on the Faculty Advisory Committee to the Honor System. He was instrumental in the implementation of the flexible exam system at UVA Law, which “could not exist without an honor system. There is no way you could maintain that kind of thing where some students will take an exam before others in the same course take it. So we rely on it very heavily.…”^[17] During his time at UVA, Meador also published two books: Criminal Appeals: English Practice and American Reform in 1973, and Mr. Justice Black and His Books in 1975.

Mr. Meador Goes to Washington

In 1977, Meador left UVA Law to become the Assistant Attorney General for the newly created Office for Improvement in the Administration of Justice (OAIJ). According to Meador:

“The OIAJ had a variety of missions; central among them was the responsibility to work with Congress and the judiciary on measures to improve the federal courts. This step expressly committed the department, for the first time, to a broad-gauged, continuous program for the improvement of the entire judicial system, both civil and criminal.… Between 1977 and 1980, this office initiated several major legislative proposals concerning the courts and collaborated with congressional committees in developing others.… These included bills to broaden the Supreme Court’s discretion to determine the cases it would hear, to establish a new intermediate appellate court, to relieve the courts of unnecessary diversity of citizenship jurisdiction, to broaden the authority of federal magistrates, to reform class damage actions, and to improve various aspects of federal court administration.”^[18]

Ten years later, in an article in The American University Law Review, Meador described in detail the history and fruition of one of those bills, which created the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and was a merger of the Court of Claims and the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. The plan for proposing a new appellate court began to take shape in early 1978 with the assistance of Charles L. Haworth, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and deputy assistant attorneys general Ronald Gainer and Paul Nejelski. Phase I of the plan involved Haworth’s contacting people in Washington to gather ideas and to determine the level of support for the restructuring of the appellate courts. Phase II involved drawing up a proposal to create a new court of appeals, assimilating the feedback from the judiciary, and working with members of Congress to draft legislation. The bill was introduced in Congress in 1979, passed in 1980, and signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1982.^[19]

While at OIAJ, Meador continued to teach a course on federal courts, in two extended sessions twice a week.^[20] In 1977, Meador received the Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award.^[21] Unfortunately, it was also during this year that Meador, who was already blind in one eye due to a detached retina, became blind in his other eye due to the same condition.

Returning Once Again to UVA Law

Meador returned to UVA Law full-time in the fall of 1979, after Maurice Rosenberg, a law professor at Columbia University, took his place at OIAJ. In addition to teaching, Meador became the director of a new graduate program for judges, a program that was conceived when the Appellate Conference of the American Bar Association approached UVA in 1977.^[22]

The Master of Laws in the Judicial Process was designed for state and federal appellate judges, and Meador described it as an “academically oriented program that took a substantial amount of time, two summers for six weeks each summer.”^[23] The judges “had to write a thesis in addition to the coursework in the summer,” which was “to a great degree interdisciplinary, things like law and social science, law and economics, legal history, and jurisprudence. It was unique.”^[24] The program far exceeded any other graduate program for the American judiciary in terms of duration and academic substance, and was the only university law school judicial education program that enabled sitting judges to receive a degree.^[25] Funded by the State Justice Institute, which was created by Congress, the Master of Laws in the Judicial Process program began in 1980 with 28 judges enrolled and continued to grow, but Congress reduced funding for the program it was cancelled in 2011.^[26]

The program far exceeded any other graduate program for the American judiciary in terms of duration and academic substance, and was the only university law school judicial education program that enabled practicing judges to receive a degree.

Not surprisingly, Meador received many awards during his career, including the American Judicature Society Award, the Raven Society Award, the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the U.S. Military Academy, and the Samuel E. Gates Litigation Award of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He also received the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Award. UVA President Robert M. O’Neil spoke of Meador as a “renowned scholar, talented administrator, Fulbright Lecturer, IREX Fellow to the German Democratic Republic, superlative teacher,” and someone who has “demonstrated the character, integrity, and qualities of mind which the Founder of the University, if he were alive today, would personally salute.”^[27]

He received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Center of State Courts in recognition of his more than twenty years’ worth of contributions to the administration of justice and to the work of the Center. In addition, he received the Kathleen McCree Lewis Award for Appellate Justice. Meador was appointed by Ronald Reagan to serve on the Board of Directors of the State Justice Institute “to further [the] development and improvement of judicial administration in state courts throughout the United States, in an effort to assure individuals ready access to a fair and effective system of justice.”^[28]

Life After UVA Law

In 1994, Meador retired from the Law School, but he continued to serve as the director of the Master of Laws in the Judicial Process program at UVA. As professor emeritus, he continued to write and participate in the life of the law school. He published three novels: His Father’s House (1994), Unforgotten (1999), and Remberton (2007). In 1995, in honor of Meador, UVA Law established an endowed lectureship on Law and Religion. “The focus of the Meador Lectureship will be the interplay of religion and law as powerful forces in the development of Western civilization and the influence of religion in the development of law.”^[29]

UVA President Robert M. O’Neill spoke of Meador as someone who has “demonstrated the character, integrity, and qualities of mind which the Founder of the University, if he were alive today, would personally salute.”

Meador served on the Commission on Federal Judicial Selection at the UVA White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs in 1997. In 1998, he was appointed executive director of the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals, which was created by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and chaired by Justice Byron White. The Commission studied the appellate system and made recommendations on circuit alignment and structural reforms.^[30] From 2005-2006, Meador helped establish a school of public policy at UVA, which eventually became the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

Meador died on February 9, 2013, at age 86, after a brief illness.