Dignitaries, statesman George Shultz gather for Dale E. Fowler School of Law dedication

Dale E. Fowler ’58 jokes about the fact that he has lived all his life within three miles of Chapman University, near the creek where his grandfather started a sand and gravel business and the venerable high school his mother attended, which now forms the historic classroom core of his alma mater.

“I guess I haven’t progressed very much,” he says.

But university leaders and dignitaries, including former
Secretary of State George Shultz, who gathered at Chapman University Tuesday to honor Fowler’s landmark gift of $55 million to the law school would disagree. That bequest from Fowler and his wife of 52 years, Sarah, sets a path for the law school that will be profound and far-reaching, President Jim Doti said during the dedication program held in Donald P. Kennedy Hall.

“They are helping to create a new trajectory for our law school that will lead to real prominence in terms of the impact it will have on legal education,” Doti said. With such a philanthropic spirit, the Fowlers join a tradition of Chapman donors who “have a transformational impact in the lives of the graduates and in our larger society.”

In recognition, the university’s law school was formally renamed the
Dale E. Fowler School of Law.

Fowler has deep ties to the campus and community. In 1912 his grandfather began a business excavating sand and gravel from nearby Santiago Creek. When he enrolled at Chapman, its primary buildings were comprised of the old Orange High School, where his mother had been a student. Two of the Fowlers’ three children attended Chapman and a granddaughter is a faculty member in the Department of English.

Fowler grew up in Orange County, paid his way through college and made his first real estate investment before graduation. From that 10-unit Huntington Beach apartment building he went on to build a thriving business in industrial property development, eventually expanding throughout Orange and Riverside counties.

The law school gift reflects his belief that a strong legal system is fundamental to protecting the “freedom, integrity and entrepreneurship” that has contributed to the nation’s strength and liberties, Fowler said.

In his remarks as the dedication ceremony’s keynote speaker, Shultz said that kind of entrepreneurial attention comes at a pivotal time in U.S. history. In his talk reflecting on the higher calling of law and its role in monitoring governments, Shultz called on the legal profession to defend the division of state and federal powers intended by the authors of the U.S. Constitution.

“Remember this division of powers. Remember the importance of the market as a way of getting things done. We’ve been drifting away from it,” he said.

Those ideals and values were echoed by Alex Kozinski, chief judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“At the Dale E. Fowler School of Law students will learn how law can be a part of wealth and not an obstacle to the economic development of society as well as a guarantor of individual liberties,” Kozinski said. “Indeed, I would say you can’t have personal freedom without economic freedom.”

Opened in 1995 as California’s only law school on a university campus in Orange County, Chapman’s Fowler School of Law has since earned a Top Schools position in U.S. News & World Report.