Colleges and universities today are probably the most heavily regulated organizations in the United States in terms of the number and types of statutes and judicial precedents with which they must comply.
— Barbara A. Lee
I. WILLIAM A. KAPLIN: THE MAN AND THE SCHOLAR
William Albert Kaplin was born May 11, 1942, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and grew up in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda, New York. Staying close to home, he attended college at the University of Rochester. Later, he ventured a bit farther, but not much, to Cornell University Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Cornell Law Review and received his law degree in 1967.
Bill worked briefly for a large Washington law firm, then as law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1968, he accepted a position as an attorney-adviser in the general counsel’s office of HEW, also known by its more formal name, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. HEW had been created fifteen years earlier in 1953 to consolidate in one Cabinet-level department all the federal government’s programs and agencies promoting social welfare. Bill’s duties at HEW included serving as special advisor to the Department’s Assistant General Counsel for Education and counsel to the Department’s education grant programs.
In 1970, at the age of 28, Bill joined the faculty of the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, where he spent the remaining 43 years of his professional career. He wrote the first edition of his treatise The Law of Higher Education during the mid-1970s, just as colleges and universities across the nation were embarking in earnest on the process of institutionalizing in-house legal offices. From the appearance of the first edition of his treatise in 1978 until the publication of the supplement to the sixth edition in 2024, Bill presided over the metamorphosis of his creation, from the work of one author to a collaborative effort involving a team of four co-authors; from one volume to multiple volumes with supplements; from a single work intended for all higher education administrators to separate works prepared for student affairs professionals, law school professors, and law school students; then, in recent years, into a website for delivering time-sensitive content to lawyers and their higher education clients.
Bill died on October 21, 2024, at the age of 82. He left his wife of 45 years, Barbara Ann, three daughters and a son, and sixteen grandchildren and great-grandchildren to whom he was “Grampa Bill.” Bill bestowed two extraordinary legacies on his profession: a collection of encyclopedic reference works charting the expansion and maturation of the field of higher education law, and a sense of identity on the part of its practitioners that theirs is a specialty field with its own subject-matter demands and its own professional and ethical expectations.
The Law of Higher Education has spent almost half a century atop the college lawyer’s reading list. It occupies pride of place as the profession’s indispensable, authoritative sourcebook on higher education law. Yet while the treatise has been reviewed and analyzed by law school faculty who specialize in higher education law, including some who have written treatises of their own on that topic, now is a propitious moment to reexamine Bill’s work in our field. The Law of Higher Education was not the first attempt to codify higher education law. It is not the last, nor the longest.
This Article endeavors to explore several questions. How did the treatise come to be? What was happening in higher education in the mid-1970s that made the moment ripe for publication of the first edition? Why Bill? When Jossey-Bass approached him, he was an assistant professor with only a few years of law school teaching experience. Finally, what legacy did Bill leave for us through his more than four decades of treatise writing and editing? In ways that were unimaginable two years or even one year ago, higher education is under frontal attack from the very agencies of government that until recently professed to be committed to the sector’s long-term health and growth. At many of the nation’s colleges and universities, the suddenness of that change and the threat it poses have altered higher education law practice in ways that none of us, Bill Kaplin included, could have anticipated.
II. HIGHER EDUCATION LAW BEFORE THE KAPLIN TREATISE
A. Origins of the “Law” of Higher Education, 1867 to 1944
Bill named his book The Law of Higher Education. What constitutes “the law” of higher education, and how has “the law” changed over time? Before Kaplin & Lee, scholars ascribed to the term “higher education law” a fairly narrow meaning: higher education law referred to the forms of law – constitutions, statutes, regulations, and court decisions – promulgated by branches of government insofar as those laws applied to colleges and universities.
Bill’s treatise recognized that the output of legislatures, agencies, and courts represented one important part of higher education law, but he used a different spin to describe it. Instead of referring to higher education law as a form of government regulatory law, he used a more interesting descriptive term: external law, or law “created and enforced by bodies external to the institution.” Bill then added a second category of law, which he referred to as internal law, by which he meant “the law the institution creates for itself in its own exercise of institutional governance.” Internal law delineates the authority of the institution and delegates portions of it to departmental and school faculties, to the student body, and sometimes to captive or affiliated organizations. Equally important, internal law establishes the rights and responsibilities of individual members of the campus community and the processes by which these rights and responsibilities are enforced.
Because of this distinction, Bill was among the first scholars to expand the notion of higher education “law” beyond direct government regulation to encompass an institution’s own internal rules, regulations, and policies. He was also among the first to perceive the danger in allowing the government to use its external lawmaking power as a technique for coercing institutions to alter their own internal policies and rules.
In sum, the law of higher education, as codified in Kaplin & Lee, encompasses the government regulations, the institution’s own internal policies and rules, and any other legally enforceable standards of procedure or conduct that the institution, its trustees, its officers, its students, and its corps of faculty and staff must honor and the violation of which subjects the institution or its agents to legal liability. As government regulation grows and assumes new forms, higher education law becomes more complex. As institutional policies and rules become longer and more difficult to parse, the role of the campus’s legal team becomes more visible. As law accretes, so does risk.
Bill Kaplin embarked on his life’s work at a propitious moment in the history of American postsecondary education, just as higher education law exploded in complexity and the role of campus counsel emerged from the shadows. One cannot appreciate the magnitude of the changes that occurred in American higher education in the 1960s and 1970s without understanding the very different state of higher education law in the century and a half before Bill started his teaching career at Catholic University in 1970.
One reason, certainly, for government’s hands-off approach to higher education in the early years of the republic was the tiny size of the higher education sector. Historians estimate that, at the time of the American Revolution, there were fewer than ten colleges in the American colonies enrolling a total of fewer than one thousand students. Once the war ended, the number of colleges in the former colonies grew and the aspirations of the founders of those colleges broadened. Most of the young country’s new colleges arose on the edge of settlement in the undeveloped interior and uninhabited boundary areas, and their founders viewed them as institutions for civic as well as pedagogic purposes.
As colleges grew in number and assumed new responsibilities for promoting civic virtue, states took upon themselves statutory obligations to charter new institutions of postsecondary education. Chartering laws were generally structural, requiring governing boards and bestowing upon those boards enumerated duties and responsibilities. But they were also operational, assigning statutory obligations to boards and trustees in areas such as governance, curriculum, admission, student residential life, and finances. With new statutes came new oversight responsibilities for state authorities and the primitive start in the late nineteenth century of regional accreditation requirements.
In the Civil War era, Congress enacted the first significant federal higher education laws. The Morrill Act of 1862 provided grants of land to states in the northern and western United States for the operation of so-called land-grant colleges promoting agricultural and mechanical education. Five years later, in 1867, Congress passed legislation creating the original Office of Education. That legislation, although modest in ambition, marked the first time Congress provided funding for general support of higher education. The act explicitly restricted the new agency’s powers to data collection and the issuance of assessment reports. Two decades later, Congress passed the Second Morrill Act of 1890, extending the benefits of the first Morrill Act to the formerly confederate states in the American South.
As summarized in an early chapter of Kaplin & Lee, the enactment of the two Morrill Acts after the Civil War marked the moments when the federal government and state governments became heavily involved in postsecondary education, creating many new legal requirements and new forums for raising legal challenges. What started as a trickle of federal legislation with the two Morrill Acts and the 1867 law became, at roughly the time of Bill Kaplin’s birth in 1942, a flood.
B. Seeds of Modern Higher Education Law, 1944 to 1961
Until America’s entry into World War II in 1941, higher education institutions thrived largely independent of federal regulation and control. During those days long past in the history of American higher education, what little regulation existed was imposed in the main by state governments. Between 1945 and today, all of this changed. Institutional autonomy has been limited by requirements of institutional compliance. Deference has been diluted by oversight. Academic freedom has been constrained by a maze of federal regulations.
When and why did the focus shift to compliance? The federal government’s nineteenth-century objectives in establishing the Office of Education and fostering the creation of state agricultural and engineering colleges were policy-neutral, designed to promote higher education as a whole rather than affect its direction. But in the early years of World War II, the federal government needed something in return for its investment. World War II federal oversight was different: it was, in a sense and to varying degrees, coercive, designed to promote a specific federal or public policy agenda separate from the direct purpose of federal funding.
First chronologically was the sprawling law known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, formally the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. As World War II entered its final stages, the federal government anticipated the return of millions of service members to the civilian labor market. Congress responded by creating in the G.I. Bill a generously subsidized program of benefits and programs designed to make it easier for veterans to go to college. The law’s impact was transformative both for the nation and for the higher education sector.
The second contributor to the growth of the nation’s higher education sector after World War II was the rapid expansion of federal funding for scientific and engineering research. Before World War II, the federal government had supported scientific research largely through federal employees in federal laboratories. After the war, it expanded its support of science by awarding grants to university scientists to carry out government projects at the universities themselves. With that level of funding came a veritable explosion of compliance, bookkeeping, and spending requirements for colleges and universities.
Federal funding of research at colleges and universities is based on a contract model. The Government promises to fund the basic science, and scientists at colleges and universities promise that the research will be performed well and honestly and will provide a steady stream of discoveries that can be translated into new products, medicines, or weapons. In order to ensure that the colleges and universities perform the work well and honestly, the government has adopted an increasing array of regulations. The contract model thus uses compliance with regulations as a means to ensure that the purposes of the funding are met.
The breadth of federal grant and contract regulation over the last four decades is nothing short of astounding. New federal regulations are detailed, arcane, and fraught with compliance risk for any university entrusted with the task of accounting for expenditure of federal monies.
C. Beginning of the Era of Explosive Growth in the Provision of Legal Services to Institutions of Higher Education, 1961 to the Vietnam Protest Era of the 1960s and 1970s
Other factors, too, added to the scope and volume of federal compliance mandates on college and university campuses in post-World War II America. In the early 1960s, as the war in Southeast Asia grew in scale, college campuses erupted in war-related protest, some of which disrupted classroom activities and resulted in large-scale arrests. Peter Ruger drew a direct connection between calls from campus administrators for legal assistance in dealing with college protests in the 1960s and the simultaneous establishment of in-house legal offices on some of the most severely disrupted campuses.
A need for legal services to higher education was created by campus disruptions during the Vietnam era. Court orders were sometimes sought to quell protest. Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education confirmed the existence of due process rights for students involved in disciplinary proceedings at public universities. The unpopularity of the war in Southeast Asia, and the concomitant aversion to strong sanctions against anti-war demonstrators, led to the creation of disciplinary codes, at both public and private institutions, that rivaled criminal codes. The eradication of doctrines of charitable immunity exposed private colleges to tort claims for the first time. Colleges, faced with significant legal expenses for the first time, began hiring counsel, often from the firms already providing legal services to the institution.
Dixon v. Alabama is generally regarded as one of the most significant judicial decisions in higher education history. It strikingly altered within several years the legal relationship which had existed for decades between the college and its students, and, in the end, quashed the in loco parentis approach to college administration.
At the same time, something of even greater magnitude was feeding the need for legal involvement on campus. Legislatively, the decades of the 1960s and 1970s were the most consequential in a generation. The period saw the enactment of major voting rights and civil rights legislation; the birth of affirmative action programs; passage of the nation’s first laws prohibiting racial discrimination and other forms of discrimination in hiring and promotion; prohibitions on gender discrimination and later on discrimination against the elderly and the disabled; the nation’s first environmental protection laws; workplace safety laws; privacy laws; laws encouraging the unionization of faculty members and other sectors of the college workforce; and laws subjecting intercollegiate athletics to new levels of regulation.
By the mid-1970s, forces outside the University, both by happenstance and by design, had so intruded upon and changed the structure of institutions that they had in effect become actual participants in the management of colleges and universities. Bill saw early on that the investment of billions of federal dollars to increase the capabilities of higher education’s scientific and biomedical infrastructure, while transforming higher education in indispensable and irreversible ways, posed a threat to its independence as well. He foresaw that with new regulations would come new compliance obligations, new responsibilities for campus lawyers, and new risks of federal coercion through executive orders and agency enforcement actions.
D. Growth of the “Lawyerization” of Higher Education in the 1970s
Posterity records that the first university to engage the services of a dedicated in-house lawyer was the University of Alabama in 1895. Prior to 1960, no more than a dozen institutions had in-house counsel, and there was little perception on the part of college and university administrators that legal issues required more than intermittent attention from volunteer trustees or part-time officials who happened to be lawyers.
Starting in the 1960s, legal offices were created at an accelerating rate, until by 1994 almost eighty percent of NACUA’s member institutions had in-house counsel’s offices. In-house counsel hired outside counsel and managed the work of attorneys employed at outside firms; performed portfolios of their own work for institutional clients; and made triage decisions about what work would be performed by outside lawyers and what would remain in-house.
With respect to the attributes of prototypical in-house college lawyers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, they tended to be experienced lawyers who, once employed at the institution, worked in a small office or, more likely, alone. They were hired primarily from general-practice law firms that either provided legal services to the institution or were represented on the institution’s governing board. They possessed standard notions of themselves as general practitioners conducting wide-ranging corporate practices marked by breadth rather than depth.
Twenty-five years later, in-house legal practice had changed considerably. By 1985, NACUA had grown from an organization of a few hundred institutional representatives to more than two thousand. Campus legal offices had become larger on average. New hires tended to come from offices at other colleges and universities instead of law firms, suggesting the maturation of a career track in the field of higher education from entry-level position at one institution to a specialized position there or at a larger one.
This, then, was the state of play at the time Bill Kaplin joined the faculty at Catholic University Law School in 1970 and looked for a field of legal scholarship to make his own. He had worked for two years as a practicing higher education lawyer, in his case as attorney-adviser to the top-ranking federal lawyer charged with enforcing higher education laws and regulations at HEW. He joined the ranks of Catholic University’s law school faculty with some awareness of changes in the field of higher education law, in particular the burgeoning number of laws and regulations with which colleges and universities were expected to comply.
III. “THE TREATISE”
In his third year of law school at Cornell in 1966, Bill Kaplin co-authored a law review article on what was then an arcane subject: America’s decentralized, haphazard, and idiosyncratic approach to the accreditation of colleges and universities. As a higher education law specialist at HEW in 1969 and 1970, Bill wrote several additional articles on the accreditation process and other education-adjacent topics. In his first year as a newly hired tenure-track faculty member, he had a heavy teaching load that included Constitutional Law, Local Government Law, and an interdisciplinary course in higher education and the courts.
As Bill settled in as a law school faculty member, he continued to play a visible national role as an expert on college and university accreditation. In 1971, he published an account of the Marjorie Webster litigation, characterizing the case as one of the most historic higher education battles ever waged in the courts and predicting that the decision in favor of the accreditor would have a significant effect on the future of the profit motive in education.
In his first few years at Catholic University, Bill provided time and services to the nation’s most prominent organizations in the field of accreditation, the Council on Postsecondary Accreditation, as an author and consultant. The result in 1973 was his lengthy monograph Respective Roles of Federal Government, State Governments, and Private Accrediting Agencies in the Governance of Postsecondary Education. On a topic of considerable technical and political complexity, Bill’s prose was characteristically concise, and his conclusion measured.
Across the country in San Francisco, a young entrepreneur was hard at work on a new publishing venture. Allen Jossey-Bass launched his own publishing company in 1966, and in 1970 the company inaugurated a new imprint called the Jossey-Bass Series in Higher Education. The publisher’s higher education books were conceived as practical how-to manuals for targeted segments of the higher education workforce.
Jossey-Bass was not the first publishing house to explore the market for higher education books. Earlier efforts had included The Colleges and the Courts, Thomas Edward Blackwell’s Current Legal Problems of Colleges and Universities, and Blackwell’s later College Law: A Guide for Administrators. These works contained the seeds of the approach Bill Kaplin later adopted: make the law accessible and pertinent to administrators, take advantage of the university’s own organizational chart to structure it, write in straightforward fashion, and keep old-fashioned legal writing habits – long reproductions of source material and pages crowded with footnotes – far from the main text.
Around the time Jossey-Bass published the Dressel-Mayhew book, someone in the publishing house contacted Bill Kaplin and asked him whether he would try his hand at writing a comprehensive treatise on higher education law. In the autumn of 1975, Bill hand-wrote a letter to the acting dean of Catholic University’s law school requesting sabbatical leave to work on the book. At that point he had prepared a detailed outline of the book, which was tentatively titled Law and the Administration of Postsecondary Education.
In 1978, when Bill prepared his application for promotion to the rank of full professor, he included an endorsement letter from J. B. Hefferlin, identified as Jossey-Bass’s editor for higher education. The letter explained the publisher’s aim: to produce a definitive volume for college and university administrators about the law as it affects their work, and to create not merely a supplement to existing literature but the most definitive, authoritative reference possible on the topic.
The first edition of The Law of Higher Education, as it was serendipitously rechristened during the editing process, was published in 1978. It was 500 pages long. In the year of its publication, it won an award from ACE for the year’s most important book concerning higher education. Reviews were complimentary. Reviewers described it as the first full-length treatise on the law of higher education, a valuable guide to almost every aspect of higher education law for lawyers, administrators, and students, and a work that helped the literature on higher education reach a new level of maturity.
Bill’s treatise was a wonder. It came with a logical roadmap to the legal terrain he intended to cover. Its writing was comprehensible, lucid, and not without occasional lightness of tone. The beginning of the book went many pages before the reader encountered the first footnote. Explanations of complicated legal concepts were unhurried and easy to follow.
Between 1978, when the first edition of Kaplin & Lee was published, and 2024, when Bill died, the book went through twenty-two hard-copy iterations. The first and second editions were the only ones that attributed authorship solely to Bill. Starting with later supplements and editions, Barbara A. Lee became his co-author, and later editions added Neal H. Hutchens and Jacob H. Rooksby. Over time, the project expanded into supplements, special editions for student affairs professionals, collections of teaching materials, and web-based resources delivered through NACUA.
For all intents and purposes, NACUA is now the home of Kaplin & Lee. As of the time period in mid-2025 in which this Article was prepared, it was not clear whether another hard-copy successor to Kaplin & Lee would be published, or when, or by whom.
IV. WHAT THEY WROUGHT
In 2007, to mark the publication of the fourth edition of Kaplin & Lee, the Journal of College and University Law ran two reviews. One was by Professor Michael Olivas, and the other by Martin Michaelson, a prominent higher education practitioner. Those thoughtful reviews appeared at an interesting moment of transition in the history of higher education law, just as the Internet was changing how lawyers conducted legal research.
Professor Olivas praised the substance of the treatise but questioned whether the enterprise could continue on an uneven trajectory marked by periodic updates, long delays, and a traditional print publisher. Readers and users, he argued, required more regularly updated and more readily available texts. He believed the treatise needed a different publication model if it was to maintain its usefulness in a fast-moving field.
The criticism illuminates a problem that became more acute with time. Professor Olivas appears to have viewed Kaplin & Lee as a law school casebook, but Kaplin & Lee was considerably more. It was both casebook and treatise. Later in its life cycle, its authors produced both treatise and casebook versions by supplementing the leather-bound treatise volumes with paperbound student versions containing more primary source material, more Socratic questions, and less synthesis.
Marty Michaelson’s 2007 review tackled a different subject. After praising the fourth edition for its size, he asked whether The Law of Higher Education fulfilled its purpose and whether there is such a thing as higher education law as a specialized field. He proposed four indicia for determining when a corpus of law reaches such a level of complexity, coherence, and importance that scholars and practitioners elevate it to a recognized field of legal study: whether legal services are arrayed specifically to that field, whether colleges and universities’ chief legal officers are experts in that field, whether law school curricula respond to that field, and whether a critical mass of issues in that field differ from issues in other fields.
On the first point, the claim that law firms did not maintain lawyers focused primarily on higher education has become less persuasive over time. Today many law firms that represent significant numbers of college and university clients have Higher Education practice groups, and many lawyers spend the lion’s share of their time representing higher education clients. In-house lawyers, of course, devote one hundred percent of their time to higher education matters.
On the second point, some chief legal officers of universities may enter the role from outside the field, but they quickly seek to become experts by studying the statutes, regulations, and internal policy manuals that constitute higher education law, by consulting knowledgeable colleagues, by attending NACUA continuing legal education programs, and by reading Kaplin & Lee.
On the third point, the fact that many components of higher education law are taught through courses that are not labeled higher education law does not negate the existence of the field. Many recognized specialties in legal practice require competence in procedural and doctrinal subjects that are taught in more general courses.
On the fourth point, it is clear that many issues in higher education do differ from those in other practice areas. Immigration questions involving student and scholar visa categories, discovery disputes over tenure and promotion dossiers, and the dense web of intercollegiate athletics regulation are obvious examples. The question whether lawyers who represent college and university clients can be said to be practicing in a specialized field known as higher education law is important, but it is also practical and rooted in professional identity.
Under a practical approach, one practices higher education law if one is trained in the legal principles, laws, and regulations with which college clients must comply, if one has the professional experience and training to satisfy the duty of competence, and if one can perform higher-quality work for a college client than someone who has never done it before. By those criteria, it is safe to characterize the lawyers designated by institutions of higher education as their NACUA representatives as lawyers who practice in the specialized field of higher education law. Nobody has delineated that practice field more authoritatively over the years than William Albert Kaplin.
V. EPILOGUE: CHANGE AS A CONSTANT IN HIGHER EDUCATION LAW
In 1978, under Bill’s editorship, the Journal of College and University Law published an extraordinary article on legal issues involving computer utilization on campus. The article covered topics such as drafting computer procurement contracts, detecting and preventing computer data fraud, protecting patent rights in computer software, safeguarding the confidentiality of computer records, and how lawyers could be in the vanguard of the upcoming computer revolution by adopting computer usage into their own offices. Bill appreciated before many of his peers how computers and computer networks would change both the substance of the work campus lawyers were called upon to do and the way they performed that work.
Today, when higher education lawyers gather, they devote considerable attention to electronic resources. Computers and software, particularly web-based software and software-as-a-service tools, have changed the nature of every attorney’s job and the manner in which they perform legal research. The ubiquity of electronic devices means that lawyers are constantly at work. Clients can reach them mid-conference on cellular phones and laptops, and responses are often expected before the session ends.
The way lawyers perform legal research is different from what it was when Bill Kaplin produced the first edition of his treatise. In those days, legal research was done in a library, with notes taken on yellow legal pads and critical cases photocopied for later reading. Today, research is conducted through online reference services, full-text libraries, overnight book delivery, PDF files, and cloud-hosted storage accessible from almost anywhere.
The digital revolution affects not just the production of work product but the way campus lawyers organize their offices to handle workflow. In the 1980s, campus lawyers managed documents using filing cabinets and three-ring notebooks. Today, they use enterprise management software tools, e-discovery systems, online billing platforms, ethics and compliance trackers, and other digital systems.
Electronics have changed professional lives in more nuanced ways as well. Human beings process information differently when it is presented on a screen rather than on a printed page. In law schools, digital modes of presenting pedagogical materials have largely supplanted traditional printed modes. Screen reading encourages skimming, scanning, and rapid movement through text, while print encourages deeper, more linear reading. The difference has implications for the continued relevance and design of legal treatises like Kaplin & Lee.
When the first edition of Kaplin & Lee appeared a half-century ago, a campus lawyer’s principal responsibility was to conduct legal research, and that research required tools for organizing the corpus of primary source materials. Today campus lawyers do not spend the same proportion of their time performing legal research as they once did. The automation of routine research-oriented functions has transformed campus lawyers from analysts to strategists.
Artificial intelligence is now performing tasks once handled by junior associates, including the generation of drafts of motions, contracts, memoranda, and analytical predictions. Although human review remains unavoidable, lawyers are increasingly freed to focus on higher-level thinking and strategy. Bill Kaplin was alert to that kind of change long before many others were. In a 1985 article, he traced broad themes in substantive higher education law and also reflected on changes in the practice of higher education law itself.
Bill never passed up an opportunity to champion preventive lawyering. For him, preventive lawyering was a point of entry for reflections on other practice issues. He devoted sustained attention to the craft of higher education legal practice – how legal offices should be organized, how lawyers should relate to administrators and faculty, how legal risk should be managed, and how a lawyer’s role extended beyond research into advising, strategizing, educating, and helping institutions avoid conflict before it ripened into litigation.
Bill Kaplin’s most lasting contribution to the field of higher education law rests here. He perceived that representing institutions of higher education as a practicing lawyer was different from other forms of legal practice – different because of the unique characteristics of that particular form of institutional client and different because of the people who worked in that field. He was the first scholar who devoted sustained attention to the practice area itself. He offered insight into the way a college legal office should be organized. He thought about the personal and professional qualities a higher education lawyer needed to interact effectively with college administrators, faculty members, and students. He even imagined, well before many of his peers, how those little computer boxes would change the practice of higher education law.
Today, a young lawyer aspiring to a career in higher education law might not start by pulling a copy of Kaplin & Lee off the shelf. That lawyer might instead open a browser and begin reading on screen about what the field has to offer. But the career on which that young lawyer subsequently embarked would still be shaped in large part by organizing principles Bill Kaplin and Barbara Lee developed over decades of scholarship. Bill and Barbara have been the embodiment of what it takes to practice in the field of higher education law: quiet and direct, wise and experienced, aware of history, sensitive to themes and connections, kind, always helpful, and always wonderful colleagues. They allow us to think of ourselves as practitioners in a distinctive field – the law of higher education – that bears their imprimatur.
