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Over the next 10 years, Blumberg recruited top professors from around the nation and orchestrated the law school’s move from a drab and crowded brick building in West Hartford to the imposing former campus of the Hartford Seminary in Hartford’s West End. After he stepped down from the dean’s office in 1984, at the age of 65, he finished his seven-volume scholarly treatise\u00a0The Law of Corporate Groups<\/em>.<\/p>\n\u201cI left Wall Street because it was time to do something else,\u201d Blumberg said in 2002. \u201cHalf of my friends in the business world said I was crazy; the other half said it was wonderful. They were both right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Professor Richard Kay, who also arrived at UConn Law in 1974, remembers a dean with \u201ca spine of steel\u201d whose expectations were high and whose success at improving the law school\u2019s standing remains unmatched.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether dealing with the faculty, the staff, the students, or the administration in Storrs, he made clear that he expected nothing less than the very best we could produce,\u201d Kay said. \u201cWe are all now living with the result, a school whose impact on law and legal education is felt not just in Connecticut, but nationally and internationally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blumberg was born Sept. 6, 1919, in Baltimore, the son of Lithuanian immigrants. His father, Hyman Blumberg, was a garment worker and a founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Hyman Blumberg became the union\u2019s executive vice president and moved the family to New York, where Phillip attended public school, skipped several grades and entered Harvard College 10 days after his 16th birthday.<\/p>\n
After earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in government, he went on to Harvard Law School. Before his graduation,\u00a0magna cum laude,\u00a0<\/em>in 1942, Blumberg was invited to clerk for Judge Learned Hand on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Instead, he joined the Army Air Corps and served as a judge advocate on circuit among air bases in Great Britain during World War II. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service. The missed opportunity to clerk for Hand \u201cwas trivial by comparison\u201d to the sacrifices of those who lost their lives in the war, Blumberg said in an oral history interview conducted by UConn Law Professor R. Kent Newmyer and Bruce M. Stave in 2009.<\/p>\n After the war, Blumberg worked for two years at a large Wall Street firm and then joined the boutique firm of Szold & Brandwen, later Szold, Brandwen, Meyers & Blumberg. He spent 20 years in a successful and lucrative practice focused on mergers and acquisitions and became president of Federated Mortgage Investors. The realization that it was time to change his career struck suddenly after the Harvard reunion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fellows talked about nothing except who was making the most money in the class,\u201d he later said. The next morning, while shaving, \u201cI looked in the mirror and I said, \u2019Blumberg, you\u2019re as bad as all the rest.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n He took a position in 1968 as a professor at Boston University Law School at a salary equal to one third of his Wall Street earnings and remained there for six years. In 1974, when he was named dean of the UConn School of Law, he said in an interview with The Hartford Courant that his goals were to convert UConn Law from a good law school to a great one, to give law students extensive practical experience, and to attract more minority and female students.<\/p>\n He turned his attention almost immediately to moving the campus from the Asylum Avenue building, which he described as \u201cdesperately overcrowded\u201d and, worse, \u201can unimaginative building, which makes it difficult for students to think largely of themselves and their aspirations.\u201d By 1978 he had wrung $6 million from a reluctant state legislature and Gov. Ella Grasso to buy and renovate the neo-Gothic Hartford Seminary campus in the capital city\u2019s West End. The law school moved there in 1984.<\/p>\n Blumberg had, meanwhile, been recruiting faculty. \u201cEverybody talks about my contribution in getting our beautiful new campus,\u201d he said in 2009. \u201cI think the new faculty people played a more important role in the growth of the school.\u201d Among the professors he hired were Loftus Becker, John Brittain, Mark Janis, Bruce Mann, Tom Morawetz, Richard Pomp and Carol Weisbrod.<\/p>\n Janis, hired in 1980 to build a program in international law, saw Blumberg bring the drive of a Wall Street lawyer to bear at a time when the law school needed it. \u201cPhillip had very high expectations, for the faculty, for the staff, and he would let you know if you met those expectations or didn\u2019t,\u201d Janis said.<\/p>\n The law school was, for Blumberg, a mission, one that he shared with his friend and eventual successor, Hugh Macgill. Janis remembered many times finding them on weekends, working together in Blumberg\u2019s office. \u201cThat\u2019s what they did, seven days a week. They didn\u2019t have work hours, they had a cause,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Weisbrod remembers Blumberg as \u201ca man with an almost military sense of order\u201d who could also be generous and loyal. \u201cHe appreciated the strengths of others and could be paternal in his concern for young academics. He was a friend who asked about the activities and progress of children,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Years after he stepped down, Blumberg recalled how the decision surprised his friends and colleagues. Yet it made perfect sense to him. \u201cIt\u2019s not good for an institution to have the same leadership. It has to have a life of its own that doesn\u2019t depend on any individual,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n After he resigned as dean, he finally took the sabbatical he had deferred 10 years earlier when leaving Boston University Law School, devoting that time to\u00a0The Law of Corporate Groups.\u00a0<\/em>Afterward, he returned as a professor to UConn Law, teaching corporate finance, business organizations, multinational corporations and corporate responsibility. He also continued to publish articles on corporate law and multinational corporations. He was a visiting lecturer at universities in The Netherlands, Poland and Australia and served as an advisor in three American Law Institute Restatements and on the Legal Advisory Committee of the New York Stock Exchange.<\/p>\n In his years teaching and writing after serving as dean, Blumberg remained an integral part of the law school. Rachele Torres, assistant director of admissions, remembers him as a tough but courtly professor with \u201ca tender heart.\u201d He never missed the annual faculty and staff holiday potluck, she said, and she would often see him walking to work along Fern Street.<\/p>\n \u201cI stopped a few times and said, \u2018Hi, Phillip, do you want a ride?\u2019 and he always waved me off,\u201d she said. He continued to walk to the law school throughout his 80s and into\u00a0his 90s, she said.<\/p>\n During Blumberg\u2019s tenure as dean, in 1976, his wife, Janet Mitchell Blumberg, died. In her memory, he donated generously to fund the restoration of the Great Hall in Hosmer Hall, which has since been known as Janet M. Blumberg Hall. Together they had four children, all of whom survive him: William, Peter, Elizabeth and Bruce.<\/p>\n He also leaves his wife, Ellen Ash Peters, whom he married in 1979, a year after she was appointed a justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court. Peters, a former Yale Law professor who taught at UConn Law as a visiting professor, subsequently served as the court\u2019s chief justice from 1984 until 1996. In her honor, Blumberg established the Hon. Ellen Ash Peters Prize Scholarship and the Ellen Ash Peters Professorship. On his 80th birthday, in 1999, a group of friends established the Phillip I. Blumberg Professorship. He collected a multitude of awards, before and after his retirement, including an honorary LL.D (Doctor of Laws) from the UConn School of Law in 1994.<\/p>\n Blumberg retired from full-time teaching in 1990 but continued his scholarly pursuits. In 2010, when he was 91 years old, Cambridge University Press published his final book, his first in the field of legal history,\u00a0Repressive Jurisprudence in the Early American Republic: The First Amendment and the Legacy of English Law<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI regret that I did not have the opportunity to meet Dean Blumberg and to thank him personally for all that he gave to our law school community,\u201d Dean Eboni S. Nelson said. \u201cWe are forever indebted to him for his transformational leadership of the law school.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Phillip I. Blumberg, who left a flourishing career on Wall Street to teach law, led the UConn School of Law through a critical period. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":169287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1857],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1856],"class_list":["post-201252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 20:37:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201252"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201256,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201252\/revisions\/201256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/169287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201252"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=201252"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=201252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}