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2 Dublin U. L.J. 76 (1978-1980)
Professor Frances Moran

handle is hein.journals/dubulj2 and id is 78 raw text is: 







Obitu ary



                    PROFESSOR FRANCES MORAN

   Professor Frances Elizabeth Moran, who for 30 years was Professor and then
Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College, Dublin, died on October 7th 1977
at the age of 83. She was a woman of dominant and attractive personality who
achieved success in a country which still has rather old fashioned ideas about
the place of women in society.
Born on December 6th, 1893, the second daughter of SenatorJames Moran,
she was educated at Dominican College and Trinity before being called to the
Irish Bar in 1924, at which she took silk in 1941. In 1925 she was appointed to
the first of a succession of posts in the Law School at Trinity.
   In 1932 she became Professor of Equity at the King's Inns and in 1934 was
appointed Professor of Laws at Trinity. From these two positions she
dominated Irish legal education, and won a place of peculiar respect and
affection in the hearts not only of lawyers but of Trinity graduates in general.
In 1944 she was made Regius Professor at Trinity, holding the chair until 1963.
She retired from the King's Inns professorship in 1968.
  Fran Moran's lectures were rigorous affairs. She liked to begin at 9 a.m. and
on the stroke of the hour her petite figure, beautifully groomed, and clad in a
rather formidable black silk garment, mounted the rostrum. A few
well-directed questions on such topics as the Rule in Shelley's Case and the
Contingent Remainders Act, 1887, exposed the ignorance of the class, whose
members were then quite content to accept an account of the law of property
dictated at paralysing speed. These lectures were not marked by slavish
adherence to the latest research, but rather taught the virtues of accuracy and
precision. Sloppiness in law or in the use of English was fot tolerated . As she
took a keen, if somewhat selective interest in the lives of her pupils, and was
always well-informed, the future lawyer might also find that any deviation
from the high standards of behaviour to be expected of a member of a learned
profession was rebuked in some scorching phrase of the kind which comes easily
to citizens of Dublin assessing each other's conduct.
  Acquaintances revealed the mellow side of her character. Like ail Irish
people, she loved a social occasion and was an indefatigable attender at Trinity
Week parties - always adorned in a very gay, but never unsuitable hat. To a
favoured few she would dispense sherry, cigarettes, and legal gossip with a lavid
hand in her own college rooms. She was always receptive to new ideas, and
surprisingly tolerant of the changes suggested to ier by the junior members of
her staff. Most suitably, she became the first woman to sit on the Board of the
College. Her taste for adventure led her to attend the Nuremberg Trials (lier
comments on judges. counsel, and prisoners would have been an addition to
international law and history if anyone had collected them), and also to
undertake some world tours for the International Federation of University
Women, of which she became President.

(Reproduced from The Times by permission)

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