The gift’s next generation of defenders.
The trusts are perpetual, but their defenders are not. Every generation of beneficiaries needs its own lawyers.
School-trust law is real, winnable, and two centuries deep. It is also a field with a structural problem: the trusts are perpetual, but their defenders are not. Every generation of beneficiaries needs its own lawyers, and most generations have gone without — not because the claims were weak, but because no one had gathered the law, and every new advocate had to start from nothing.
The Bar exists to end that. It will be a pro bono panel of trial and appellate lawyers, researchers, and law students who take up the defense of the school trusts — equipped from day one, so that no member ever starts from scratch.
What a member of the panel gets.
- The hornbook — a complete first-draft treatise of school-trust law, nineteen chapters with a state appendix for each of the twenty trust-land states, published by America’s School Trust Library and free to read.
- The public case-law catalog — the case-law gateways for these trusts are kept by America’s School Trust Library, a separate institution that takes no position in litigation. Its own workshop page reports 220 files held and 19 public so far. The public ones sit in the Library’s catalog, which anyone may consult; the rest are not yet released, and the panel has no privileged access to them.
- The Oregon case record — OASTL is a party in active Oregon school-trust litigation, and the complaint, the rulings, the appellate opinion, and the other public filings are gathered on the OASTL Legal Desk. Panel members work from a live record and from lawyers who have argued it, not from a hypothetical.
- Model materials — briefing architecture and model legislation to work from rather than reinvent.
Owned by the cause, not by a bar association.
The panel is organized by Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands, which runs the Renewal today; a dedicated nonprofit home for the program is still in formation. It is deliberately independent — owned by the cause, not by any bar association. The panel’s public details will be announced here when they are ready; this page will stay spare until then.
The on-ramp is open now.
You don’t have to wait for the formal panel. The law is already built and free to read — start with the lawyer’s entrance to America’s School Trust Library and the hornbook itself. If the work speaks to you, raise your hand: write to Dave Sullivan, president of OASTL, at drdavesullivan@gmail.com.
Allies who aren’t lawyers are welcome too. Legal librarians, researchers, and archivists have a standing invitation at the Library’s librarians’ entrance — an invitation from that institution, not from OASTL.