Oral Histories
Interview of James A. C. Grant
UCLA professor of political science and dean of the UCLA School of Law and Social Sciences. Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate.
- Subtitle:
- Comparative Constitutional Law at UCLA
- Series:
- Interviews not in a series, part one
- Topic:
- UCLA and University of California HistoryUCLA Faculty
- Biographical Note:
- UCLA professor of political science and dean of the UCLA School of Law and Social Sciences. Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate.
- Interviewee:
- Grant, James A. C.
- Supporting Documents:
- Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research.
- Language:
- English
- Copyright:
- Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library.
- Abstract:
- Move to Los Angeles in 1907; enrolling in the University of California, Southern Branch; faculty and courses in political science and history; transferring to Stanford University to complete undergraduate education; Victor J. West; dissertation on the California legislature; teaching position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes; developing a relativist, interventionist philosophy of the law; evolution of liability doctrine; judicial versus legislative authority in questions of public policy; social activism and the law; move to UCLA in 1930; the Department of Political Science; Charles Grove Haines; the development of the Academic Senate; striving to become recognized as a first-class institution; the importance of faculty research and publications; Lawrence Clark Powell; placement of students; the UCLA student body in the 1930s; philosophy of teaching; evolution of research into comparative constitutions; research on Canadian and Colombian constitutional law; Ibero-American Congress in Constitutional Law; opinions on American intervention in Latin America; on Reaganomics; work for the air-conditioning industry; Robert Gordon Sproul; Clarence A. Dykstra; development of professional schools at UCLA; reorganizing the College of Letters and Sciences into divisions; Grant's appointment as dean, Division of Social Sciences; allocating resources; World War II; the War Labor Board; President Harry S Truman's loyalty boards; the loyalty oath controversy; opposition to the loyalty oath; debates within the Academic Senate; Academic Senate committee formed to mediate the loyalty oath dispute; student activism in the 1960s; Grant's work as adviser to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam on constitutional and legal issues; Diem's opposition to an independent judiciary; the role of Michigan State University in advising the South Vietnamese government; ignorance of conditions in South Vietnam in the United States government; John Wilson O'Daniel, chief, United States military advisory group, 1954-55; Grant's efforts to start a joint Mexican-United States law program at UCLA in the early 1940s; decision to start a law school at UCLA; formation of planning committee in 1947; insisting that the law school be built on campus; search committee for first dean; the regents hire L. Dale Coffman against the advice of the search committee; Rollin M. Perkins; Harold E. Verrall; Roscoe Pound; Brainerd Currie; Coffman's anti-Semitism; James H. Chadbourn; faculty revolt against Coffman; Raymond B. Allen; Charles E. Young; involvement with the American Lung Association of Los Angeles County; appointment to the hearing board for the South Coast Air Quality Management District; conflict with Union Oil.