Difference between revisions of "Carl S. Hawkins"

Latest revision as of 20:30, 29 October 2023

Carl S. Hawkins was a law school dean and prominent lawyer.

He was born on April 3, 1926, the second child of Willard Davis Hawkins and Wilma Stolworthy Hawkins. He grew up in Provo, Utah. He served as a radio operator in the Army Air Corps, stationed in the Pacific theater of operations, during World War II.

On September 11, 1946, Carl married his high school sweetheart, Nelma Jean Jones, in the Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hawkins attended Brigham Young University and earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 as a political science major. He earned an LL.B. degree with honors from Northwestern University Law School in 1951, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as editor-in-chief of the Illinois Law Review, now the Northwestern University Law Review. He also received the Wigmore Award for reflecting outstanding credit on his law school and did postgraduate work in 1951 as the Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, working in their legal drafting program.

In 1951-52, Hawkins was an associate of the firm of Wilkinson, Boyden & Cragun, in Washington, D.C., and in 1952-53 was law clerk to Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1953-57, he was a partner in Wilkinson, Cragun, Barker & Hawkins, in Washington. Hawkins was instrumental in the firm's successful representation of several Indian tribes in claims against the U.S. government.

In 1957, he accepted a position as a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where he was a popular and dedicated teacher and scholar. He also contributed to the creation of many bills before the Michigan legislature and served as executive secretary of the Michigan Law Revision Commission, chairman of the Civil Procedure Committee of the Michigan state bar association, and reporter of the Michigan Supreme Court Committee on Standard Jury Instructions. He was co-author of a six-volume work on rules of procedure for Michigan courts and also co-author of two torts casebooks.

Carl accepted a position as one of the founding professors of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 1973, where he taught until his retirement in 1991. The importance of Carl's faculty appointment to the law school was predicted by Dean Willard Pedrick of the Arizona State University College of Law, who told then BYU law school Dean Rex E. Lee during the initial faculty search that Carl's presence on the faculty would give the new law school "instant credibility." When Carl called then BYU President Dallin H. Oaks in 1972 to accept his appointment at the law school, as then Professor Bruce C. Hafen recalled, President Oaks told his colleagues, "I guess the Lord really wants this law school ... to be a good one. Carl's coming."

Emotion still fills Elder Hafen’s voice when he talks about that moment. “I saw tears in his eyes,” he says of President Oaks. “The people who were really experienced in legal education knew Carl, and they felt that if the BYU Law school met his standards, then it met their standards.”[1]

In addition to his teaching and research responsibilities, Hawkins was acting dean of BYU's law school from 1975 to 1977 and dean from 1981 to 1985 and was a professor there until 1991. Hawkins was the inaugural holder of the Guy Wilson Chair at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. During his tenure at BYU, he also had visiting faculty appointments at the law schools of the University of Georgia, Pepperdine University, Washburn University, and the University of New Mexico. He took a two-year leave of absence to serve as executive director of Florida's Academic Task Force for Review of Insurance and Tort Systems, which produced legislation for comprehensive medical malpractice and liability insurance reform in that state.

Hawkins also spent many hours in public service. He was a commissioner and vice chair of Utah's Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and chair of the Attorney General's Utah Administrative Law Advisory Committee, which drafted a comprehensive Administrative Procedure Act in 1987. At the national level, he was a charter member of the National Conference of Bar Examiners' Multi-State Essay Examination Drafting Committee. He also served on the Association of American Law Schools' Accreditation Committee. He was appointed by President Carter to the Judge Nominating Commission of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

While at Michigan and BYU, he published widely in professional journals. He also contributed to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism and in 1999 wrote The Founding of the J. Reuben Clark Law School.

Hawkins was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and held many positions, including bishop of the Ann Arbor (Michigan) Ward, counselor to President George Romney of the Detroit Michigan Stake, and president of the Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan, stakes. He served in leadership positions in BYU student stakes and was a member of the Church's evaluation correlation committee for more than eight years. He was an instructor of the high priests' group and served as a stake coordinator for the name extraction program and submitted thousands of names through the volunteer Family Search Indexing Program.

He passed away after a brief illness on April 25, 2010.

• Source: Deseret News, "Obituary: Hawkins, Carl"