Trinity Law School - Background and Origins

Background and Origins

The Trinity Law School, as it is now known, was founded in 1980 as the Simon Greenleaf School of Law and was originally located in Anaheim, California. It was originally named in honor of the Nineteenth century Harvard law professor Simon Greenleaf who was a major authority on the laws of evidence and also wrote The Testimony of the Evangelists, which was a work of Christian apologetics concerning the evidences for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Simon Greenleaf School of Law was the brain-child of John Warwick Montgomery. Montgomery rose to prominence in the 1960s as a confessional Lutheran theologian and as a Christian apologist. He held the chair of Professor of Church History at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois (1964–74). A founding board of trustees collaborated with Montgomery to establish in 1980 the Simon Greenleaf School of Law.

It commenced operations by offering evening classes in a four-year undergraduate course in legal studies that led to the Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree, and a one-and-a-half year post-graduate course in Christian Apologetics that led to the conferral of a Master of Arts degree.

The founding faculty members, as listed in the inaugural edition of the school's journal The Simon Greenleaf Law Review, in the law program included Ronald S. Ayers, Jack D. Brewer, Beatrice S. Donoghue, Laurence B. Donoghue, Jack W. Golden, Roy W. Hibberd, David L. Llewellyn, John T. Moen, David S. Prescott, Vincent Schmieder and Donald E. Thomas. These faculty members were Christian lawyers who worked in private practices in Southern California.

In 1997 the law school became a part of Trinity International University (TIU), an evangelical Christian institution of higher education headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois, and operated by the Evangelical Free Church of America.

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