Judge Joseph A. Artl, 1922 (1893–1970) Joseph Artl served the citizens of Cuyahoga County for over four decades and was one of its most respected public officials. Elected to Cleveland City Council in 1932, he served as Democratic minority leader and briefly, in 1936, as Council President. He was appointed to the Cleveland Municipal Court in 1936, where he presided for a decade. In 1947 he was elected to the Common Pleas Court. Among his many adjudications was the 1949 order enjoining employees of the Cleveland Transit System to cease a work stoppage. In 1963, Artl was elected to the first of two terms on the Ohio Court of Appeals for the Eight District. Honored by his peers, he was named the county’s Outstanding Democrat by the 33rd Ward Democratic Club in 1961.
Mayor Newton D. Baker (1871–1937) Newton Baker was one of our most prominent trustees when Cleveland Law School opened its doors in 1897. He received his bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University before moving to Cleveland to practice law. Baker was appointed assistant law director in 1902 and city solicitor in 1903. He went on to serve as Mayor of Cleveland from 1912-1915, during which time he actively promoted municipal Home Rule, helped to write the 1912 Ohio constitutional amendment on the subject, and campaigned for the 1913 passage of Cleveland’s Home Rule Charter. Baker was a founder of the law firm of Baker, Hostetler & Sidlo (now BakerHostetler) in 1916, and that same year President Wilson appointed him Secretary of War. In 1921, he returned to private practice in Cleveland, where he was active on many charitable and corporate boards and advocated for American participation in the League of Nations.
Alfred A. Benesch (1879–1973) Alfred Benesch was one of the three principal founders of John Marshall School of Law, where he taught Municipal Law, as well as a founding member of the Cleveland firm Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff. His undergraduate and law degrees were from Harvard University. As a young lawyer, he defended the rights of the Peddlers’ Self-Defense Association to police protection and in 1922, in a series of letters to the President of Harvard subsequently published in The New York Times, he successfully challenged a proposal to establish quotas on Jewish people admitted to the school. He was elected to the Cleveland City Council in 1912, and in 1914, Mayor Newton D. Baker appointed him the city’s public safety director. He served on the Cleveland Board of Education for 37 years, one of the numerous boards he served on throughout the city.
Dean Charles S. Bentley (1846–1929) Charles Bentley was a founder and the first dean of Cleveland Law School at its inception in 1897. Born in Chagrin Falls, he earned both a B.A. and an M.A. from Hillsdale College. Bentley studied law in the offices of attorneys in Michigan and Cleveland before his election in 1887 to the Sixth District Court of Appeals, where he remained until his retirement from the bench in 1895. Some of the cases that Bentley handled as a judge established important precedents and principles in the law dealing with the public utilities of petroleum, natural gas and electricity as a motive power. Bentley continued as dean and professor at Cleveland Law School until his retirement in 1914.
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