Ron Phillips and the rise of the Christian lawyer
A tribute with a surprising number of references to xylophagous beetles
This weekend, Pepperdine will honor Ron Phillips at its annual law school dinner. Phillips served as dean of the law school for 27 years beginning in 1970. In the spirit of the celebration, I thought we would take a look at the legacy of his deanship, which seems even greater now, at a remove of 27 years. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that, over the last 54 years, Pepperdine has remade itself in the image of Ron Phillips, Christian lawyer.
In 1969, little Pepperdine College in south Los Angeles was adolescing rapidly and experiencing all the concomitant growing pains. The year before, the school had announced plans to open a new campus on donated land in Malibu, so administrators were racing to raise funds for construction. The business division was spun off into a School of Business (now Graziadio), and the School of Continuing Education was handing out diplomas as if they were flyers. Amid this hustle and academic bustle, the community was still reeling from the shooting of Larry Kimmons, the tragic victim of a Chekhov gun that had been hanging over the school’s proverbial mantel since the Watts riots of 1965.
Against this backdrop, Pepperdine acquired the Orange University College of Law, an unaccredited night school offering a part-time J.D. from a strip mall in Santa Ana. Hired as the inaugural dean of the Pepperdine era was Ron Phillips, a young attorney from Texas with connections to Pepperdine’s sister school Abilene Christian College. Phillips set to work in 1970, and the achievements started piling up: within ten years, he had earned accreditation from the state and national bar associations, assembled a faculty from scratch, and moved the school to swanky new digs in Malibu dedicated by US Supreme Court justices.
But these sorts of accomplishments, as impressive and important to the institution as they were, are not the most significant part of his legacy. That’s because, in addition to being a legal educator, Phillips is a sower of seeds.
![Dean Ronald Phillips at the podium, "The Reagan Seminar," Jan. 12, 1979, Pepperdine University Archives Photograph Collection:
https://pepperdine.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p271401coll15/id/8730/rec/83 Dean Ronald Phillips at the podium, "The Reagan Seminar," Jan. 12, 1979, Pepperdine University Archives Photograph Collection:
https://pepperdine.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p271401coll15/id/8730/rec/83](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffab5cb23-3e6e-4b32-a225-adbf7f98045f_819x658.png)
There’s this parable about the dining hall at New College, one of the constituent schools of Oxford University, founded in the 1300s. One day, the huge 400-plus-year-old oak beams supporting the roof were found to be beetle-eaten and in need of replacement. But where can you even find oak beams of that size anymore, was the question on everyone’s lips. Well, as it happens, for hundreds of years a long line of college foresters had been saving some big old oaks for construction projects like this one. So you should start planning now to fix problems that aren’t even problems yet, is the idea.
Phillips, I’m going to suggest, is like the forester in the story—except, instead of planting a forest to supply construction materials, he set up a machine that churns out Christian lawyers, who ended up being very much in demand by the university. To explain what Phillips did, though, I first need to take you up into the rafters and show you the crumbling wood lousy with ptinids so we can understand how the need for lawyers arose in the first place.
Around the time Phillips came to Pepperdine, higher education started getting more legally complicated. For one, the regulatory burden was growing steadily. In 1972 alone, for instance, two major developments imposed new requirements on Pepperdine that multiplied administrative overhead. That November, California voters approved Proposition 20, creating the California Coastal Commission, which would require all construction projects in the state’s coastal zones to win the approval of the commission in addition to any local regulatory bodies. This seriously slowed development on Pepperdine’s new Malibu campus, which would forevermore have to draft piles of paperwork in order to build projects that had already been approved by county officials, especially if there were environmental concerns, such as the destruction of rare species like purple needlegrass.
A second cause of ballooning bureaucracy was the passage of the Education Amendments of 1972, best known for Title IX, which prevents sex-based discrimination in schools receiving federal funds. Title IX is celebrated for popularizing women’s sports, but it also imposed new regulatory burdens on schools, with new requirements for hiring, training, handling grievances, etc.
Before Phillips came to Pepperdine, the school had very few lawyers on staff because they had very little need for any. The administration was run in large part by academics: every Pepperdine president before 1985 held a Ph.D. But as the university professionalized and as the regulatory environment grew more demanding, lawyers became more valuable: every Pepperdine president since 1985 has held a J.D.
Legal training, however, was only half of the equation when it came to recruiting because Pepperdine also wanted Christians. The university’s bylaws require that certain positions at Pepperdine—including the presidency and the chair of the Board of Regents—be filled by members of the Churches of Christ, the faith tradition to which the founder belonged. And Christian bona fides were a plus in hiring for other positions, too. So Pepperdine’s desiderata in this era—the huge oak beams it was looking for, so to speak—were not just lawyers, but Christian lawyers, and especially Church of Christ lawyers.
By the time Pepperdine began realizing this need for Christian lawyers, Ron Phillips had been pumping them out for years. He did so in at least two ways. First, he recruited Christian lawyers to teach at the law school, giving them experience administering academic programs so they could subsequently be drafted into the university’s central administration. Examples of this pathway include David Davenport, a University of Kansas–educated lawyer hired to teach at the law school in 1980. He became Pepperdine’s legal counsel in 1981, executive vice president in 1983, and president in 1985.
The second way Phillips prepared Christian lawyers for Pepperdine was by educating them at the law school, after which they were hired by their alma mater. A good example of this is Gary Hanson, who graduated from the law school in 1980 and replaced Davenport as general counsel in 1983. Following Davenport’s path up the cursus honorum, Hanson became executive vice president in 2006.
Christian lawyers like Davenport and Hanson have made good use of their legal training over the last 40 years, navigating dicey legal waters to win Coastal Commission approval for the Drescher campus, to broker international real estate deals, and to ensure compliance with the ever-multiplying regulations governing higher education. But they aren’t the only two. Twenty-first-century administrators like Jim Gash, Tim Perrin, Steve Potts, Keith Hinkle, and Ron’s son Phil Phillips are all products of the Ron Phillips pipeline in one way or another, as are board members and major donors like Terry Giles, Rick Caruso, and Mark and Michelle Hiepler.
Nor is Pepperdine the only Church of Christ university to have benefitted from the Ron Phillips pipeline of Christian lawyers. Sister schools Lipscomb, Oklahoma Christian, and Lubbock Christian have also sourced presidents from Pepperdine’s law school—that’s Randy Lowry, John deSteiguer, and Tim Perrin, respectively. When you consider the second- and third-order influence of those whom Phillips has influenced, things spider out dendritically so fast the mind boggles.
The Ron Phillips tribute essay is a genre unto itself, with specimens from Supreme Court justices, governors, and longtime colleagues. I’ve so far mostly flouted the generic conventions, and not just because I keep on bringing up beetle-damaged timbers. By now I should have offered a couple wisecracks about his neatness, a lengthy paean to his personal integrity, and a heartfelt remark about his late wife Jamie. What I can give you instead are a few exemplary quotations from the genre supporting my point about the lasting influence of his deanship on the university:
“He saw our school twenty-five or thirty years in the future and asked the question, ‘Is this a good way to get there or are we doing something which might be good right now but hurt us in the long run?’” —Charles Nelson
“The character, dedication, and diligence of Ron and Jamie Phillips will be at work in future decades and future centuries, long after those who honor them today are but memories.” —Wayne Estes
“He has helped shape, not only a School of Law over the past twenty-seven years, but also a University.” —Steven Lemley
Even at a distance of 27 years, it’s still too soon to deliver a full reckoning of all the ways Phillips affected the future of the university during his deanship, and that would be to say nothing of his now equally lengthy tenure as vice chancellor, or the family dynasty he launched, or his service to the church on campus. But I’ve seen enough to thank him for the role he played in preparing Christian lawyers for lives of purpose, service, and leadership at Pepperdine.
Further reading
Jenny Rough and Jim Gash, In Good Faith: The first 40 years of the Pepperdine University School of Law, Abilene Christian Univ. Press, 2018.
David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepperdine Univ. Press, 2016, chapters 24-25.
William Rehnquist et al., “Tribute to Ronald F. Phillips,” Pepperdine Law Review 24.4 (May 1997): 1169-1208.
Madison Nichols, “The Man I Met at Starbucks,” The Graphic, 25 Sept. 2019.