Utah’s Legendary Law School Dean was an Irish Catholic

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Forty years ago this fall I started my final year at the University of Utah College of Law. I was on the cusp of a doctorate, but still had much to learn. 

Despite walking past his prominent portrait almost every day for three years, I never realized until recently that the legendary law dean at Brigham Young’s university also was one of Utah’s most prominent Irish Catholics.

William H. Leary (1881-1957) led the Utah law school for almost four decades, beginning in 1916. He retired from the post 75 years ago in 1950.

The University opened in 1850, when Governor Brigham Young asked the territorial assembly to charter it. Initially called the University of Deseret, the U adopted its present name in 1892 with John Park as president.

At about the same time the U got its name, Leary was a kid working on his family’s farm near Hatfield in Western Massachusetts. His parents—potato famine immigrants from Cork and Tipperary in Ireland—could not read or write, but they worked hard and scratched out a living growing tobacco.

Shortly before Bill Leary was born, his older brother James ran away from the family farm looking for fame and fortune. James soon found work with a New Mexico cowboy outfit. 

According to his 1923 Salt Lake Tribune obituary, James was a “rider of the range” in the Old American West. He settled down in Salt Lake City after he bought several cattle stockyards.

Meanwhile, Bill attended Amherst College and joined the same fraternity as future United States President Calvin Coolidge. When Bill graduated in 1903, he also moved out west, looking for adventure with the older cowboy brother he idolized.

James helped Bill find clerk work with the Salt Lake City police court and as a reporter for The Salt Lake Herald, but Bill yearned for a legal career. When Bill left to study law at the University of Chicago in 1905, The Intermountain Catholic mourned the loss of a “popular young man.”

Bill graduated in 1908 and returned to Salt Lake City to practice law. He worked initially with a future judge and congressman named Frederick Loofbourow, but eventually found his way to academia.

At John Park’s request, former Utah senator Joseph Rawlins had been teaching miscellaneous law classes since 1883. In 1906, Park’s successor Joseph Kingsbury launched the state’s only formal legal education program. 

By 1912, that law department had become an official school of law. Kingsbury appointed Frank Holman—an impressive young lawyer and future president of the American Bar Association—as the first dean.

Catholic Bill Leary’s 1916 appointment to the same prestigious post in a state dominated by Latter-day Saints probably was a response, at least in part, to an academic freedom controversy that erupted a year earlier. 

News archives indicate that in the spring of 1914, the U’s valedictorian—a Latter-day Saint—criticized the Board of Regents and the Utah State Legislature for “ultra-conservatism” that suppressed the spirits “of young, progressive” students. 

Kingsbury, another Latter-day Saint, blamed certain faculty members for encouraging what he viewed as misguided youthful misbehavior. He feared the university’s legislative (and financial) support was in danger.

In February 1915, Kingsbury fired four non-Mormon professors without any discussion or appeal options. The regents supported his unilateral actions as did Governor William Spry, The Deseret News, and The Herald-Republican newspaper. 

Many faculty, students, and alumni did not, and they objected loudly. The Salt Lake Tribune and The Evening Telegram sided with the protesters. 

The U’s first law dean—Frank Holman—resigned in protest along with about a third of the faculty. Holman’s resignation letter was scathing, stating in part, “I am not in harmony with a policy of repression, suspicion and opportunism in university administration…”

Kingsbury shrewdly appointed the Catholic Leary—amiable, popular, and respected by all sides to the controversy—as Holman’s replacement. Although Kingsbury resigned a few months later still under heavy criticism, Leary stayed in his post for the next 35 years. 

Leary was beloved for many reasons, including that he was a skilled and colorful teacher. The law school prospered under his guiding hand, growing to over 300 students and earning both accreditation and academic distinction.

Leary pitched for the lawyers’ team in a regular baseball game against the city’s doctors. He also could be seen at all sorts of sporting events supporting his children.

He was an usher at the Cathedral of the Madeleine, led the Knights of Columbus, and taught classes at the local schools run by the Holy Cross Sisters. When Pope Benedict XV’s papal representative was in town, it was Leary who introduced him at a Hotel Utah black tie dinner. 

After Leary first got married in Iowa, a friend greeted him at the train depot and drove the new couple to their new apartment. Other friends stationed along the mile-long motorcade route cheered and showered them with rice the whole way.

A similar scene played out a decade later when the widower Leary married again. His students carried him on their shoulders into the law school where classes were cancelled and the university president joined Leary and his new bride for an impromptu reception.

Leary’s second wife was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement and close friends with Eamon de Valera, first president of the Irish Republic. When de Valera visited Salt Lake City, Leary introduced him to a large dinner group and endorsed the cause of Irish independence.

Despite his many successes, Leary endured great sadness too. His first wife died in March 1919, leaving him with five children ranging in age from 5 months to six years old. During the tragic year that followed, he lost two of his toddler sons. 

After he remarried in 1922, Leary had three more children. His second wife died in 1927, however, leaving him a single parent once again. 

He seemed to do a pretty good job in that role too. His son Peter became a Utah judge and his daughter Virginia was an accomplished law professor who focused on the study of human rights. 

When Leary died at Holy Cross Hospital in 1957 at age 75, accolades poured in from all over the country. Editorials, resolutions, and condolence notes praised his intelligence, his ethics, his legal/administrative skills, his kindness, and his prudence.

The law school has honored him with an annual lecture since 1965. Leary’s home, just steps from campus, is marked as part of the University Historic District.   

In a multi-page 1950 tribute after Leary retired, The Utah Law Review—which I helped edit some three decades later—catalogued his many professional achievements. It also noted, “Leary came to the University as a high-spirited and good-natured Irishman who made friends on first contact…”

The very highest of the high praise given to Leary after he passed involved words not often used when speaking of lawyers.

His good friend Catholic Bishop Duane Hunt, preaching to a packed house at the Cathedral of the Madeleine during Leary’s 1957 funeral, quoted the Beatitudes. He said, “Dean Leary loved justice and he was merciful.”

I don’t walk around life with a lot of regrets, but I do wish I’d known Bill Leary as something more than just a portrait on a wall that I never took the time to notice.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.