Cumberland School of Law

On the Samford University campus in suburban Birmingham sits Cumberland School of Law, an institution whose history stretches back nearly one hundred eighty years and crosses two states, a war, and the entire arc of American legal education.

Cumberland was founded on July twenty-ninth, eighteen forty-seven, in Lebanon, Tennessee, by Judge Abraham Caruthers, an innovator who believed law should be taught through active practice and close reasoning, not just through lectures on Blackstone. Seven students gathered in a law office on West Main Street in Lebanon for the first day of classes. There were only fourteen other law schools in the United States at the time. Within a decade, Cumberland had become one of the largest law schools in the nation. By eighteen fifty-eight its reputation drew students from across the South and beyond.

Then the Civil War destroyed the campus. The school reopened in eighteen sixty-five, moved into the newly built Caruthers Hall in eighteen seventy-eight, and continued producing lawyers and judges. But it never fully recovered its antebellum scale, and in nineteen twenty-one, in one of the more unusual transactions in American legal history, Cumberland was acquired by Howard College, the Baptist institution in Birmingham that would later become Samford University. The law school relocated from Tennessee to Alabama, bringing its name, its traditions, and its alumni network south with it.

Alumni of Cumberland include a United States Supreme Court Justice, multiple federal circuit judges, and more than two dozen Alabama governors and state attorneys general. The school achieved American Bar Association accreditation in nineteen forty-nine and has remained one of the Southeast's leading law schools since. For a school that began with seven students in a Tennessee law office, its reach across American legal history has been remarkable.