Inn of Court marks 25 years, honors Dean Perschbacher, Professor Reynoso
On June 13, the Schwartz/Levi American Inn of Court celebrated a quarter-century of serving as a vessel for Sacramento and Yolo County lawyers, judges, law professors and students to get together to talk shop and listen to experts address the most pressing legal issues of the day.
During a special 25th anniversary dinner at Sacramento’s Citizen Hotel, members recalled the Inn’s beginnings as the brainchild of UC Davis School of Law Professors Ed Imwinkelried and Margaret Johns. The Inn’s first president, David F. Levi, served as keynote speaker at the anniversary dinner.
Levi recalled being eager to accept an invitation to join the new Inn in 1992, when he was an Eastern District of California judge with quarters in Sacramento. Sacramento’s older Anthony M. Kennedy Inn of Court had never issued him such an invitation, Levi said jokingly. (The Sacramento/Yolo Inn was named for Levi, who just stepped down as Dean of Duke Law School, and the late Milton L. Schwartz, another Eastern District judge.)
The Schwartz/Levi Inn paid special tribute at the dinner to UC Davis School of Law Dean Emeritus Rex Perschbacher and Professor Emeritus Cruz Reynoso. Professor Emeritus Alan Brownstein offered remarks about the honorees, both former colleagues.
Perschbacher is “a decent, soft-spoken person, but there was steel in his values” when he served as Dean, Brownstein said.
"Rex was committed to King Hall having a diverse faculty. He rejected out of hand the excuses made by law schools that defended their lack of diversity on the grounds they could not find qualified candidates to hire.”
Today, “King Hall is a majority-minority faculty law school,” Brownstein said. Perschbacher provided a “firm foundation,” Brownstein said, for his successor, Dean Kevin R. Johnson, “to grow what he had cultivated.”
Perschbacher did not attend the dinner, but Reynoso was there to pick up his own award after Brownstein praised his achievements, and persistence.
Brownstein quoted from the citation on the Medal of Freedom awarded to Reynoso by then-President Bill Clinton: “Through his efforts to address social inequality in his rural community, his leadership of the pioneering California Rural Legal Assistance program, his tenure as the first Latino on the California Supreme Court and his service on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he has been a strong force for change and a passionate voice for our nation’s disadvantaged.”
“That was 18 years ago,” Brownstein continued. “And I can say that Cruz is still Cruz. He has never stopped being a force for change and a passionate voice for the disadvantaged. His life has demonstrated that courage and commitment again and again.”
Photos by Ryan Norman