Ronald B. Lansing
Ronald B. Lansing, emeritus professor at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College (1966-2008), is the founding editor-in-chief of the Willamette Law Journal (1959-1960). He was law clerk to Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice William McAllister (1960-1961) and chair of the Torts Section of the American Association of Law Schools (1977). He is the author of Skylarks and Lecterns: A Law School Charter (1983), Juggernaut: The Whitman Massacre Trial (1993), and Nimrod: Courts, Claims, and Killing on the Oregon Frontier (2005). He is current writing the history of the Northwestern School of Law.
Author's Entries
-
Charity Lamb (?-1879)
Charity Lamb was the first woman to be convicted of murder in Oregon Territory. On Saturday, May 13, 1854, she struck her husband Nathaniel in the back of the head with an axe while he was eating supper with their five children. The Oregon Weekly Times, Oregon Spectator, and Oregonian …
Oregon Encyclopedia
-
Lewis & Clark Law School
In 1883, British scholar Richard Hopwood Thornton and Matthew Paul Deady, Oregon's sole federal district court judge, took steps to found a night law school for Oregon. In 1884, they persuaded the University of Oregon to establish the school in downtown Portland, with Thornton as professor-in-charge. Law classes began that …
Oregon Encyclopedia
-
Nimrod O'Kelly
In 1852, Nimrod O'Kelly was convicted of murder in Oregon in the first officially recorded homicide case before the Oregon Supreme Court. At the age of sixty-five, O'Kelly came to Oregon on the Overland Trail in 1845 and staked a one-square-mile land claim in the heart of the Willamette Valley, …
Oregon Encyclopedia
-
Whitman Massacre Trial
On November 29, 1847, Protestant missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and twelve others were killed by members of the Waiilatpu band of the Cayuse Indian Nation. Scores of other pioneers were held captive. The killings, which came to be called the Whitman Massacre, happened at a Protestant mission in …
Oregon Encyclopedia
