Hastings College

to begin the "65 Club", the practice of hiring faculty who had been forced into mandatory retirement at age 65 from Ivy League and other elite institutions. The very first appointment in 1940 was Orrin Kip McMurray, a Hastings graduate who had served as Boalt Hall's second dean. Other American law schools competed aggressively after World War II to hire young up-and-coming law professors, but by focusing his efforts on hiring elderly ones, Snodgrass was able to bring many distinguished law professors to Hastings for "very reasonable salaries". This strategy was so successful at bringing high-quality faculty to Hastings that by 1948, 60 percent of the full-time faculty were professors who had retired from other law schools. In the mid-1950s, Newsweek published a story in which former Harvard Law School dean and jurist Roscoe Pound praised Hastings: "Indeed, on the whole, I am inclined to think you have the strongest law faculty in the nation."
Despite the difficult history between Berkeley and Hastings, Berkeley …