[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 98 (Thursday, June 18, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4292-S4293]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO BOB LAWSON

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, today I rise to pay tribute to one of 
Kentucky's greatest teachers, and a man who has served the public good 
and the law for 5 decades. My friend Professor Bob Lawson, who has 
taught law at the University of Kentucky College of Law for 50 years, 
will be retiring this July 1.
  Over the course of his 50 years of teaching, Professor Lawson has 
become one of the most respected lawyers and teachers in the 
Commonwealth. He is also well known and admired for his work outside 
the classroom as the author of much of the Commonwealth's penal code 
for criminal offenses and its rules of courtroom evidence.
  Professor Lawson was born in a small town in southwestern West 
Virginia, not far from the Kentucky border, in a coal community. 
Encouraged by his father to get an education and escape life in the 
coal camps, he attended Berea College in Kentucky and then earned his 
law degree at UK in 1963.
  In 1965, he was asked to teach law at UK, which he has done ever 
since. His specialty is Kentucky criminal law and evidence law. In the 
1970s, he worked with the State legislature to rewrite Kentucky's penal 
code, which was in need of an overhaul.
  I would point out that of Professor Lawson's thousands of students, I 
was one of them. Bob Lawson was one of my favorite professors, and I 
still recall his teachings today. I am also proud to call him a friend 
over the years. UK has greatly benefitted from having him as a member 
of the faculty for all this time, and he will be sorely missed.
  I want to thank Professor Bob Lawson for his five decades of service 
to the University of Kentucky and to the Commonwealth. For 50 years he 
led Kentucky's brightest young minds into the legal profession, and his 
many thousands of students serve as a fitting tribute to his legacy. I 
wish him all the best as he retires from UK and begins a new stage in 
life.
  The Lexington Herald-Leader published an article detailing Professor 
Lawson's life and career. I ask unanimous consent that the article be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

  After 50 Years at UK, Professor Who Wrote Much of Kentucky Law and 
                 Investigated UK Athletics Is Retiring

                            (By John Cheves)

       Robert Gene Lawson, who is retiring July 1, wrote much of 
     Kentucky law and taught thousands of the people who practice 
     it.
       Lawson spent 50 years as a professor at the University of 
     Kentucky College of Law, and he was dean twice. Among his 
     students were U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 
     Gov. Steve Beshear, U.S. Reps. Andy Barr and Ed Whitfield, 
     and most of the Kentucky Supreme Court.
       ``It's been really interesting watching my students go on 
     in life,'' Lawson, 76, said Friday, sitting in a cluttered 
     campus office that showed no sign of getting packed up any 
     time soon. ``They've done important things and mostly have 
     done them well.''
       Lawson built an equally large reputation for himself 
     outside the classroom. He authored the state's penal code for 
     criminal offenses and its rules of courtroom evidence. He 
     harangued the General Assembly, with what he considers 
     limited success, for packing the state's jails and prisons 
     with the mentally ill and the addicted. He led investigations 
     into ethics violations at the UK Athletics Department, which 
     didn't win him many friends, and into the nightmarish Beverly 
     Hills Supper Club fire in 1977 that killed 165 people in 
     northern Kentucky.
       ``He was Kentucky law,'' said Allison Connelly, a onetime 
     Lawson student who later joined him on the law school 
     faculty. ``He has done so much, when you look at his lifetime 
     of work, to make Kentucky a better place.''
       The son of a coal miner, Lawson was born in 1938 in a tiny 
     Logan County, W.Va., community almost entirely owned by 
     Island Creek Coal Co. His father urged him to escape the coal 
     camp through an education. He worked his way through tuition-
     free Berea College and then earned a law degree at UK in 
     1963.
       After two years of practicing law, which he enjoyed, Lawson 
     accepted an invitation in 1965 to teach at UK.
       ``I never thought I'd stay here,'' he said. ``I thought I'd 
     try teaching for a little bit, see what it was like, and get 
     back into my law practice. But it was a wonderful experience 
     from day one--for one thing: being around all of these bright 
     young people.''
       Lawson's specialty is Kentucky criminal law and evidence 
     law. He wrote the books on those subjects, books that occupy 
     the shelves of law libraries and judicial chambers. In the 
     1970s, he worked with the legislature to rewrite the state's 
     penal code, which was hugely disorganized at the time. ``We 
     had never reformed our criminal laws in Kentucky, so you had 
     offenses that had been added one by one over a period of, 
     what, 150 years, 180 years, and a lot of inconsistency in how 
     these offenses were treated,'' he said.
       To Lawson's frustration, within a decade of his penal code 
     work, the national ``war on drugs'' and concern over urban 
     violence led politicians in Kentucky and elsewhere to enact 
     much tougher sentencing laws.
       It's one thing to imprison a murderer for decades, but 
     these new laws put even minor criminals behind bars for long 
     stretches, Lawson said. For example: In dozens of Kentucky 
     cases Lawson researched, people were convicted of the felony 
     of ``drug trafficking within 1,000 yards of a school'' after 
     police caught them with a small personal stash of drugs in 
     their homes or cars several blocks from a school.
       ``Bob Lawson's philosophy was always, `You lock up the 
     people who genuinely scare you because they're dangerous, 
     they're violent, and for the other people, you see if you 
     can't rehabilitate them and make them productive members of 
     society,' '' said Fayette Family Court Judge Kathy Stein, a 
     former chairwoman of the state House Judiciary Committee.
       In 1974, the year Lawson's penal code changes took effect, 
     Kentucky spent $11 million housing about 3,000 inmates at two 
     prisons. This year, the state expects to spend about $500 
     million to keep about 22,000 inmates in 12 prisons and dozens 
     of county jails that are paid to hold the state's felon 
     spillover.
       The General Assembly's effort four years ago to cut the 
     inmate population--at Lawson's urging--has fallen short 
     ``because they aimed too low,'' he said. ``They tinkered; 
     they did too little.''
       Some county jails are so overcrowded that state inmates who 
     are serving five to 10 years must sleep on the floor and 
     seldom leave their cells, he said. There is little education 
     or addiction treatment provided, so felons are no better off 
     when they're finally released, and in many cases, they're 
     probably harder than ever, he said.
       ``We got mad at the people who were committing criminal 
     offenses, and we veered away from a philosophy of trying to 
     correct them, which originally had been the thrust of our 
     justice system,'' Lawson said. ``We jacked up the penalties 
     on everything. As a result, we've created this huge problem 
     of trying to pay for all of this. We're just making things 
     worse for ourselves than they were.''
       One of Lawson's other crusades over the years was trying to 
     be a watchdog of UK's lucrative and popular sports programs. 
     At the request of various UK presidents, he led 
     investigations into possible ethics violations, including 
     cases that brought about the departures of basketball coach 
     Eddie Sutton in 1989 and athletics director Larry Ivy in 
     2002.
       In 2002, as a member of the UK Athletics Administration's 
     board of directors, Lawson cast the sole dissenting vote 
     against hiring Mitch Barnhart as athletics director. Lawson 
     said he didn't object to Barnhart, but the $375,000-a-year 
     salary was ``ridiculous'' compared to the more modest sums 
     paid to other UK faculty and staff. (Barnhart remains in the 
     job and now makes $600,000 a year.)
       Over the past 50 years, the UK Athletics Department evolved 
     into its own universe with its own rules, Lawson said.
       ``They have become an independent entity, separate from the 
     rest of the university, which is a problem,'' he said. 
     ``Their budget is their budget. The athletics department 
     regards the money that comes in for athletics as their money, 
     not the university's money.
       ``And I guess I have felt, watching it through the years, 
     that they sort of lost what I would consider to be a 
     reasonable connection of these students to the university as 
     compared to athletics. Let me just give you an example. When 
     I first came here, the basketball season was 20 games. It's 
     now 40. I have my doubts about how they can be a legitimate 
     college student when they've got that problem.''
       Lawson said he also regrets the explosion in tuition costs 
     at UK and other state universities around the nation, largely 
     because of shrinking public support from state governments. 
     The next UK budget will get just eight percent of its revenue 
     from state appropriations, the smallest share ever.
       ``I think everyone who is 50 years old and older--including 
     me--ought to be ashamed of themselves for what we're doing to 
     our young people, making an education all but unaffordable,'' 
     he said.
       ``When Mitch McConnell and Steve Beshear were in my 
     classroom, I doubt they paid much more than $100 a semester 
     for

[[Page S4293]]

     their tuition. They went to school almost without any cost, 
     substantially free,'' Lawson said. ``A resident law student 
     next year will pay between $21,000 and $22,000 in tuition. 
     You can't work your way through school at that level. I have 
     students graduating with $100,000 or more in loan debts that 
     will affect them for the rest of their lives. Shame on us.''

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