They Might Be Giants

Jim Neal became a Watergate prosecutor and famed defense lawyer for such powerful clients as Ford Motor Co. and Exxon. George Barrett developed a career as a prominent labor lawyer, a renowned crusader for civil rights and an influential political player over the course of five decades. And Tom Higgins became a big-time insurance defense attorney, ascending to federal judge with an appointment by then-President Ronald Reagan.

But in 1957, when Neal, Barrett and Higgins were students in the same class at Vanderbilt University Law School, the trio were just like any other clique of shiftless twentysomethings. They lay shirtless on their dusty apartment couches, drinking cheap beer and smoking marijuana. They chased after loose women, slept through classes and exchanged flippant jokes about their law professors. And they never, ever studied.

Certainly all that would make a more interesting story. But actually, Higgins, Barrett and Neal were complete and total...ahem...nerds. They debated such heavy subjects as existentialism, politics and religion. They took part in marathon study sessions, holing up for days in Higgins’ home while his mother—yes, his mother—cooked meat and potatoes for dinner. They didn’t drink much, and it’s safe to say that that even if quarter bags of marijuana were easy to come by during the Eisenhower ’50s, they wouldn’t have touched the stuff, much less inhaled.

Long before attorneys placed photo advertisements on the tops of urinals at local nightclubs, Neal, Barrett and Higgins and many of their law school classmates viewed the law as an honorable profession—one that safeguarded an open and democratic society. To them, being a lawyer wasn’t just a job; it was both a civic obligation and an extension of one’s intellect.

“We had a highly developed sense of discipline or what one might call a work ethic,” says Judge Higgins. “I can recall late nights after studying in the library, we’d go to a local Italian restaurant for discussion and banter.” And what did the three discuss? “I suppose we talked about the very nature of man,” the judge recalls, not at all joking.

While they certainly won’t draw any comparisons to the Rat Pack, the graduates of the Vanderbilt Law School class of 1957 may well be the most impressive and influential group the university ever sent packing into the real world. They flourished in court, and in government they knew how to manipulate the system. To this day, 45 years after they got their diplomas, members of the class of ’57 continue to shape law and politics in Nashville and well beyond.

“There probably have not been too many, if any, classes where this substantial a percentage of the class has achieved such success,” says Aubrey Harwell, a prominent defense attorney, a partner of Jim Neal’s and a 1967 graduate of Vandy Law School. “Individually and as a group, they have had a huge impact on this community.”

Typical of the era, the class of ’57 was all male and, with the exception of one Asian, all white. In addition to Neal, Higgins and Barrett, the class included Thomas Shriver, the longtime Davidson County district attorney and criminal court judge who died of a heart attack in 1997, and John Hollins Sr., a former prosecutor turned Nashville defense lawyer turned divorce attorney to the stars. There was John Jay Hooker, a serial candidate for Tennessee governor and the U.S. Senate, a newspaper publisher, temporary multimillionaire, buddy to Muhammad Ali and eloquent warrior against the corruption of democracy. The elite class also included Memphians William Henry, the youngest ever chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Jim Gilliland, the general counsel for the Department of Agriculture during the Clinton administration; Al Abbey, a nationally recognized tax and real estate attorney and former general counsel to Shoney’s; Hardy Moyers, the deputy director for the Tennessee Department of Revenue over the course of four decades; and Jimmy Evans, the late commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Transportation.

And that’s to say nothing of the many lawyers who achieved stature and prominence outside of Nashville. There was Arnold Schickler who, after graduating from Vanderbilt Law School, returned to New York to start his own law firm. Today, his firm specializes in commercial litigation, listing Citibank among its clients. There was also Dan Self, who practices law in Meridian, Miss., and recently helped win an $8 million judgment for a client who had been improperly diagnosed with cancer and had to endure a chemotherapy treatment.

“It is certainly one of the most outstanding classes in the history of Vanderbilt Law School,” says Bill Willis, a graduate of the school’s 1954 class and no shabby counselor himself. “I don’t know of any explanation for why the class was the way it was. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that so many great people ended up at the same place at the same time.”

Of course, their alma mater might have played a role as well. In the 1950s, the Vanderbilt Law School was just starting to emerge as a national-caliber institution. Its facilities were unimpressive—the library was in an old chapel, and students met not in their own building but in a few makeshift classrooms at Kirkland Hall. But the school counted among its faculty a number of talented professors, including an aging but brilliant Eddie Morgan, who had been forced to retire from Harvard even though he was the nation’s premier expert on evidence. The school also had some top-shelf lawyers who lectured at the university, including Bill Harbison, who later served as the chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court and made a lasting impression on his students.