Charles W. Wolfram, the Charles Frank Reavis Sr. Professor of Law at Cornell and interim dean at the Cornell Law School, is perhaps best known professionally for his work on ethics and the law, and he is viewed as one of the luminaries in that field.
When a New York Times reporter was looking for someone to comment on Kenneth Starr's investigation several weeks ago, he called on Wolfram, whose measured assessment of the special prosecutor appeared on the front page of the Times' Week in Review section.
"Starr would like us to believe he's full of rectitude, but it's a puritanical, unappealing rectitude, concerned equally with the small and the large," Wolfram said in a recent interview.
In both instances Wolfram was being true to form. Ethical behavior concerns him, but grandstanding is not his style -- colleagues describe him as gracious, unpretentious and easygoing.
Wolfram became interested in legal ethics, as well as inspired to enter the law profession, while watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on television in 1953--54. He was in high school at the time.
"The hero in all of it was a Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, who represented the Army in the hearings," said Wolfram. "He was simply masterful -- a skilled advocate who was fair and honest."
In addition to his admiration for Welch, Wolfram had the example of his paternal grandfather, who had been a public gure in Cleveland government.
As an undergraduate at Notre Dame, Wolfram majored in political science, with a minor in philosophy. He graduated in 1959 and went on to study law at the University of Texas.
"Law school caught my imagination and my attention. I was consumed by it," he said. He remembers working up elaborate outlines for every course and doing a lot of outside reading.
After graduation, Wolfram worked for Covington and Burling, a law firm in Washington, D.C., where he rubbed elbows with the firm's figurehead, Dean Acheson, U.S. secretary of state under Truman and Eisenhower and one of the great advocates of the Supreme Court.
In 1965 Wolfram accepted a faculty position at the University of Minnesota Law School, serving on the faculty for 16 years. He joined the Cornell law faculty in 1981, when a close friend and former colleague, Peter Martin, who was then dean of the Law School, extended an attractive offer. "It was," Wolfram said, "the best and most important move of my life."
Wolfram taught his rst ethics course in 1974, the year the Watergate scandal broke. The eld has grown ever since and Wolfram has written extensively on the subject, including the leading treatise, Modern Legal Ethics, published in 1986. Since then, his full-time writing project has been the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers. He plans a second edition and envisions the project as a lifelong one.
He stepped down from teaching this July, initially planning to retire. He assumed the post of interim dean this August, after former dean Russell K. Osgood left to accept the presidency of Grinnell College. Wolfram expects to hold the position through June 1999, when a new dean will be appointed by a committee headed by Provost Don Randel.
This story contains material from an article by Leslie Intemann that appeared in the fall 1998 Cornell Law Forum.
Henry C. Granison, who earned his J.D. degree from the Cornell Law School in 1988, will return to the school in January 1999 to become the new associate director of admissions.
After graduation, Granison became an associate of the law firm of Dana and Gould in Boston, then went on to join Faegre and Benson in Minneapolis. In 1993 he left big-firm practice to become assistant director of the Minnesota Office of Lawyers' Professional Responsibility.
Interim Law School Dean Charles Wolfram commented: "I am delighted to have a widely respected and highly credentialed member of a very good class returning to the Law School as a senior administrator. That says something strong and appropriate both to our alumni and to the law school world at large. Henry's arrival will give us needed strength across the full range of our admissions efforts and permit us to go further with such endeavors as marketing."
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