Stanford's Shiny Fish

In its search for a replacement for retiring Law Dean Carl B. Spaeth, Stanford University managed to main tain its record as a ferocious raider of Ivy League faculties. Yale's bright, articulate Bayless Manning, 41, rolled into Palo Alto last summer completely equipped with wife, four children, a black Porsche sports car, a worn set of Shakespeare, an Egyptian statue, a dagger that had been used in a Philip pine murder and a rapidly expanding reputation as one of the busiest young legal scholars in the business. Manning's former boss, Yale Law Dean Eugene V. Rostow, had already given warning of the prodigy he was sending west: "Manning is one of the shiniest fish ever to come out of the sea. He has the drive, charm and quickness to do anything."

Bay Manning has been what Rostow calls "a phenomenon" ever since he hurtled out of Fall River (Mass.) High School in 1940 with a scholarship and the intellectual agility to race through Yale at the head of his class only two years later. At 19, having learned Japanese with no visible effort, he became one of the Army cryptanalysts who helped to break the Japanese naval code, which cleared the decks for U.S. victory at Midway. When he graduated from Yale Law School in 1949, he was again No. 1 in his class and editor in chief of the Law Journal. After he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, even that usually restrained jurist marked Manning as "exceptionally brilliant."

No Sulking. What admirers call his "orderly intellect" persuaded Manning to spurn Wall Street for faster progress with a big Cleveland law firm. In six years, he became not only a formidable young corporation lawyer, but also a part-time political scientist at Western Reserve University and a leading spirit of the Cleveland Metropolitan Service Commission. When Yale made him a law professor at 33, the Cleveland Plain Dealer lamented the departure of "a young man with an admirable civic conscience."

At Yale, Manning churned out pioneering articles on corporation law, organized lively seminars on everything from state governments to Latin American jurisprudence. He rebuilt a Connecticut farmhouse with his own hands, found time to draft the state's new corporation law and persuade the state legislature to enact it. Fluent in Spanish, to say nothing of Norwegian and Japanese, Manning helped to organize the Peace Corps program in Latin America, did research for the CIA, helped to draft the 1962 Trade Extension Act, toiled for NATO on the problems of a multinational nuclear force and hit the banquet trail as the Yale law faculty's most zealous rustler of alumni cash. Through it all, Manning stayed as cool and witty as ever. "He never bristles or sulks," says Rostow, "and he needs no soothing."

Well-Trained Outrage. Dean Manning sees Stanford Law (enrollment: 420) as "verging on the greatness of a Yale or a Harvard," exults in a fivefold rise in applications since 1958 that gives the school a golden chance for selectivity. He has expensive ambitions: a $1,500,000 expansion of the school's skimpy law library, ten more teachers to allow the present 20-man faculty to branch out into such fields as international trade and Soviet law. Although the university itself has just raised a record $113 million, Manning will need even more to fulfill his dream of "a great law school"-one that simultaneously trains working lawyers, leads in reforming the law, joins all scholars in philosophical inquiry and produces citizens "with a special capacity for outrage at injustice."

Already hard at work shaking Stanford-leaning money trees, Manning will also teach and do research on "how to preserve the integrity of local governments midst a burgeoning national government and a roaring national economy." If all this fails to keep him busy, he will doubtless turn up reorganizing California's education industry, while working out solutions for Southeast Asia in his spare time.

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