Corwin W. Johnson (2005)

I first met Corwin Johnson almost 42 years ago. I had arrived at the Law School in August of 1963 as a neophyte law teacher, and Corwin was one of the first people I sought out. By that time Corwin was not only an accomplished and established legal scholar, but he also taught Property to first-year students. That was the very first course I was going to teach, and I needed advice-badly. Moreover, Corwin, John Cribbet, and Bill Fritz had recently coauthored a new property casebook that I planned to use in my course. I thought that Corwin would be the ideal person to ask about the course and about his book. My choice could not have been better. Those first conversations with Corwin have always seemed to me to typify the man. He was more than generous with his time in sharing ideas and suggestions with a new colleague. His patience seemed endless. He gave good and enduring advice, both on how to teach and what to teach. One of the most attractive aspects of his property-law casebook has been that, unlike many casebooks both then and now, it did not force the instructor into a specific mold or require the taking of a specific approach or viewpoint. As Corwin explained to me, you can teach the fundamentals in a wide variety of ways using an equally wide variety of cases and other materials, and the students will still get the basics. It has been 42 years since those discussions, and in planning my first-year Property course for the upcoming year I will still to a large extent be using suggestions Corwin made in August of 1963. But perhaps we should start at the beginning. Corwin Johnson was born in 1917 in Hamlet, Indiana. Several years later his family moved to Cincinnati, Iowa, where he attended high school. There he met Evelyn Banks, his future wife and life-long sweetheart. After high school Corwin attended the University of Iowa, where he received his B.A. in 1939 and his law degree in 1941. By then his scholarly and academic bent were fully evident. He had served as Note and Legislation Editor of the Iowa Law Review and, after receiving his J.D., attended Yale Law School as a Sterling Fellow. Shortly thereafter, he and Evelyn were married. For the next few years he served as a special agent of the F.B.I, and continued that service throughout World War II. Corwin joined the faculty of Texas Law School as an assistant professor in the fall of 1947. He was among the first faculty members who had no prior connection with Texas. His avid opposition to segregation, which was then legally enforced in Texas, and his early choice of a property casebook-Property, Wealth, Land: Allocation, Planning and Development1-was viewed as dangerously radical by some of his older colleagues, and raised more than a few eyebrows. Corwin's ready smile, his relaxed but compelling arguments in support of his positions and choices, and his dry wit quickly won over the faculty. His personality had the same effect on his pupils, and his courses in Property, Land Use Planning, and Water Law were soon in high demand among law students. He progressed to Associate Professor in 1949. The following year he taught first year Property to the two students in the separate-but-equal law school that the State of Texas had created in response to Hemann Sweatt's challenge to being denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law. He rejoiced when segregation in the law school came to an end with the Supreme Court's ruling in Sweatt v. Painter.2 In 1954 Corwin was promoted to Professor, and by that time he had begun to make his mark academically. His early writings, such as The Challenge to Prescriptive Water Rights3 in 1952, dealt primarily with water law. Two of his principal works, however, came in 1960 with the publication of his property law casebook, and in 1962 with Principles of the Law of Property, which he coauthored with John Cribbett.4 Principles went through three editions. The third and final edition was published in 1989, one year after Corwin retired from full-time teaching. …