Charles D. Kelso, 1928 – 2024

Charles D. Kelso, longtime professor at McGeorge School of Law and the patriarch of a legal education dynasty, died Wednesday. He was 95.

His son, McGeorge law professor J. Clark Kelso, said his father was an early and influential voice in support of part-time law schools, computer assisted learning and law school rankings.

"He lived his entire professional career really devoted to legal education," Clark Kelso said. "He was something like 22 when he began teaching. He was the youngest law professor in the country. He continued teaching until he was 85, I think, when he retired. At the time he was the second longest serving law professor in the country. He just had an incredible career."

Charles Kelso joined the McGeorge faculty in 1978. His late wife, Jane, was dean of students and director of admissions at the school from 1982 until 2001. The pair were affectionately known to students as Mama and Papa Kelso, according to an email circulating among alumni announcing his death. Jane Kelso died in 2007.

"Professor Kelso was such a beloved professor," McGeorge Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz said in an email. "Since I shared the news of his passing, I have received dozens of emails from alumni telling stories of his kindness, his brilliance, his care for students, and his excellence as a teacher."

Clark Kelso is well known for his work as the receiver overseeing California's prison health care system beginning in 2008. He has taught at McGeorge since 1986. His two brothers are also attorneys, and all three have co-written articles in legal journals with their father.

R. Randall Kelso is a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. C. Kevin Kelso is a shareholder in the corporate and intellectual property groups at Weintraub Tobin Chediak Coleman & Grodin in Sacramento. Their sister, Paige Kelso Mair, is a retired educator and is married to a McGeorge graduate.

Clark Kelso said the legal dynasty began long before his parents' generation -- including his grandfather, great grandfather and uncle.

"I'm like a seventh generation lawyer in the Kelso lineage," he said. "It goes way back into the 1800s."

Born in 1928 in Indiana, Charles Kelso was almost as old as the school where he spent most of his career; 2024 marks McGeorge's 100th anniversary. An academic prodigy, he earned undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Chicago, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sherman Minton, and began teaching at the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis, all by the time he was 22. According to his brief autobiography posted on the McGeorge website, this made him the youngest law professor in the nation at the time by a margin of four years.

It was in Indiana where he met his wife. She graduated at the top of her class at the law school in 1953, according to an obituary posted online by her family. In 1972, they partnered in an influential study of part time law schools. Partly influenced by his own experience teaching part time students, they set out to create an objective measurement of law schools that looked at faculty, libraries and other resources.

"The study showed that people in part time education are doing about as well as people in full time programs," Clark Kelso said. "They really put part time education on solid footing against critics who might have pushed towards abolishing it."

His parents believed that part time schools were an important path for minorities and low-income people to be able to enter the legal profession. But Clark Kelso said the project also led in a direction his father regretted. Barron's magazine picked up their methodology and credited the study when it published some of the first law school rankings -- an approach later followed by U.S. News & World Report.

In the 1970s, Charles Kelso was involved with PLATO, a computer network at the University of Illinois whose features included early versions of email and instant messaging. In 1985, he and Clark Kelso cowrote an article in the Journal of Legal Education, "How Computers Will Invade Law School Classrooms." They wrote that future computerized learning would "supersede our hallowed classroom traditions," predicting the more recent proliferation of online programs.

Clark Kelso said his father died of natural causes after a series of recent health complications. The family plans to hold a private service. According to the email from Dean Schwartz, Charles Kelso is also survived by 11 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

"Not yet," Clark Kelso said when asked if there were any attorneys in the next generation.