Appalachian Figures
Louis Westerfield’s life began in a sharecropper cabin near De Kalb, Mississippi, and ended in the dean’s office at the University of Mississippi School of Law. In between, he became a prosecutor, judge, scholar, civil rights advocate, and the first Black dean at Ole Miss. For Black students who came of age in the segregated and newly desegregated South, his story signaled that the doors of the legal academy could be opened, and kept open, by someone who knew those doors had once been locked.
This is a Kemper County story that stretches from cotton rows to Columbia University, from New Orleans housing projects to the law school at Ole Miss. It is also part of a larger Appalachian and Deep South narrative about migration, education, and the long work of dismantling Jim Crow inside the institutions that once upheld it.
De Kalb, Kemper County and a Sharecropper Childhood
Louis Westerfield was born on July 31, 1949, in De Kalb, the small seat of Kemper County in east central Mississippi. Contemporary biographical sketches and reference works agree on De Kalb as his birthplace and describe his earliest years in the home of his grandparents, who worked as sharecroppers in rural Kemper County.
Kemper County lay in the borderland between the hill country and the Black Belt. In mid century, it was a place where Black families often moved between tenant farms and town jobs, and where poverty and segregation bound opportunities tightly. Genealogical sources suggest that Louis was the son of Louis Westerfield Sr. and Helen Elouise Clayborne, part of an extended Houston and Westerfield family network that appears in Kemper County cemetery and family history records. Those records are fragmentary, but they consistently point back to De Kalb and to a line of parents and grandparents who worked the land.
Like many rural Black Southerners, Westerfield’s family joined the postwar migration stream out of the cotton counties. When he was still young, he spent part of his childhood in New Orleans, where his mother lived in the Fischer public housing development on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Later accounts emphasize that he moved between grandparents in Kemper County and his mother in New Orleans, straddling two worlds: one rooted in red clay and tenant farming, the other in crowded city projects along the river levee.
New Orleans, Public Housing and the Choice to Ignore “Not College Material”
In New Orleans public schools, Westerfield ran headlong into the low expectations that marked many Black students’ lives in the 1960s South. A high school counselor told him he was not “college material” and suggested he give up on the idea of university altogether. Years later, friends recalled that he quietly rejected that verdict and set his sights on college anyway.
He enrolled at Southern University at New Orleans, an historically Black institution created during desegregation fights over where Black students would be allowed to attend. There he studied political science while working his way through school, a schedule that left little margin for error but offered a path out of poverty.
After completing his undergraduate degree in the early 1970s, Westerfield entered Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. At that time Loyola was a predominantly white Catholic law school with deep local ties to the bar and bench. To go from public housing to Loyola’s law library in a single generation was itself an act of resistance against the limits imposed by segregation.
He finished his Juris Doctor at Loyola in 1974 and, several years later, earned a Master of Laws degree from Columbia Law School in New York, one of the elite centers of American legal education.
Prosecutor, Judge and Scholar in Louisiana
Westerfield began his career in New Orleans as an assistant district attorney, trying cases in a criminal justice system that bore all the hallmarks of the Deep South: crowded dockets, underfunded defense counsel, and stark racial disparities. Contemporary professional profiles note his service as a prosecutor, law professor, arbitrator, and ultimately a judge on the Louisiana Court of Appeal, Fourth Circuit, where he served by special appointment.
Alongside that work, he taught at Southern University Law Center and then at Loyola, where he joined the full time law faculty. Those years produced the core of his scholarly writing.
In 1980 he published “The Mens Rea Requirement of Accomplice Liability in American Criminal Law: Knowledge or Intent?” in the Mississippi Law Journal, a detailed examination of what mental state should be required to hold an accomplice criminally liable. The article probed the tension between mere knowledge that one’s actions help a crime and a deeper purpose to see the crime succeed. It quickly became a leading piece in accomplice liability scholarship and is still cited in debates over complicity and in some discussions of international criminal law.
Four years later, he turned to sentencing policy in “A Study of the Louisiana Sentencing System and Its Relationship to Prison Overcrowding: Some Realistic Solutions,” published in the Loyola Law Review. There he combined empirical data on Louisiana sentencing practices with doctrinal analysis and argued that indeterminate and inconsistent sentencing fed the state’s chronic prison overcrowding. He urged the creation of a sentencing commission, clearer guidelines, and thoughtful use of probation and parole as tools to reduce overcrowding while protecting public safety. That article continues to appear in scholarship on sentencing reform and correctional policy.
Westerfield also wrote what became a standard reference work on Louisiana evidence law. The first edition of his treatise on Louisiana evidence appeared in the mid 1980s. A second edition, co authored with Bobby Harges and published in 1992 with supplements in the mid 1990s, updated the work. Courts in Louisiana and the federal Fifth Circuit have cited the treatise as an authoritative guide to state evidence rules.
These writings, taken together, show a scholar interested in the nuts and bolts of criminal law: what counts as blameworthy participation, how sentencing policy fills prisons, and how evidence rules shape the truth seeking process in court.
“In Pursuit of a Special Mission” at North Carolina Central
In 1986, Westerfield left Mississippi and Louisiana for Durham, North Carolina, to become dean of North Carolina Central University School of Law, one of the historically Black law schools founded in the Jim Crow era to train Black attorneys for a segregated bar.
A profile in the North Carolina State Bar Quarterly captured his vision as dean. Under the title “Dean Louis Westerfield: In Pursuit of a Special Mission,” Mary E. Wright described how he saw NCCU Law’s mission as more than simply producing technically competent lawyers. He wanted graduates who would use their skills in service to low income communities and to the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
The law school’s 60th anniversary history credits Westerfield with improving the law library, supporting faculty scholarship, and pushing for higher bar passage rates. It portrays his deanship as a period when the school invested in both its physical collections and its academic reputation, even as it kept tuition comparatively low for students who often came from working class backgrounds.
For Black students from the rural South and the urban neighborhoods that ringed the Appalachian uplands, NCCU offered one of the few realistic paths into the legal profession. Westerfield’s insistence on rigorous academics and community minded practice fit squarely within that tradition.
Loyola, Poverty Law and Opening Doors in New Orleans
In 1990 Westerfield returned to New Orleans as dean of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. The school’s 1993–94 Law School Bulletin lists “Dean Louis Westerfield” on the masthead and includes a “Story of Loyola” and “Goals of Loyola” statement under his leadership. The bulletin emphasizes the law school’s commitment to service, Catholic social teaching, and programs like the Gillis W. Long Poverty Law Center, which focuses on legal issues affecting the poor.
Later retrospective accounts at Loyola note that when two new faculty members joined the tenure track in 1991 there were no Black tenure track professors on the faculty except Dean Westerfield himself. That fact underscores how unusual his role was: he occupied both the top administrative position and the lone Black tenure track slot in a predominantly white law school.
Colleagues and former students writing in the Loyola Law Review after his death remembered a dean who worked intentionally to recruit more students and faculty of color, who was generous with his time, and who framed diversity not as an optional add on but as central to Loyola’s mission.
At Loyola, as at NCCU, his work connected legal education to broader questions of justice. The poverty law center, clinical opportunities, and emphasis on public interest law gave students tools to address the entrenched inequalities that shaped life from the Mississippi Delta to the coalfields of central Appalachia.
First Black Tenured Professor and First Black Dean at Ole Miss
Westerfield’s relationship with the University of Mississippi began before his deanship. In 1985 he became the first Black law professor ever to receive tenure at the University of Mississippi School of Law, a milestone recorded in the university’s “Timeline of UM African American Experience.” That entry notes that he would go on to become the first Black dean at the university.
For a campus that had only been forcibly integrated in 1962, and that still wrestled with the legacy of the Ole Miss riot and Confederate symbolism, the tenure of a Black law professor marked a significant, if overdue, change.
In 1994, the university named him dean of its law school. Institutional timelines and Black higher education histories consistently list the appointment as the moment when Ole Miss saw its first Black dean of any school.
Yearbook pages from The Advocate, the law school’s annual, show Westerfield as dean in 1995 and 1996, complete with photographs and short texts describing his leadership. One entry explains that the university had made him law dean and highlights his work to strengthen academic programs and student services.
Beyond campus, he continued civic work. A profile in the Hinds County Bar Association newsletter notes that he chaired the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the mid 1980s and served on the board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington.
Fundraising materials from the University of Mississippi Foundation in the mid 1990s show Westerfield accepting scholarship gifts and speaking about the importance of financial aid in helping students realize their potential. Later catalogs and giving pages list the Louis Westerfield Memorial Scholarship in Law Endowment among the university’s named scholarship funds, evidence that his name was quickly woven into the institution’s philanthropic story after his death.
To Black students at Ole Miss in the 1990s, a Black dean at the law school, whose childhood had been spent in a sharecropper home and in public housing, offered a very different kind of role model than the Confederate statuary and Colonel Rebel imagery that still dotted campus.
A Life Cut Short
On August 24, 1996, Louis Westerfield died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty seven. National and regional newspapers carried obituaries that traced his path from De Kalb and New Orleans housing projects to deanships at North Carolina Central, Loyola, and Ole Miss. The Associated Press obituary that ran in the New York Times summarized his career as that of a “Black law dean” who had opened doors from Mississippi to North Carolina.
The Times Picayune in New Orleans published a more detailed story under the headline “Law School Dean Louis Westerfiel[d] Dies at 47; He Opened Doors for Minorities,” stressing his role in increasing opportunities for Black law students and in mentoring younger attorneys.
Legal journals responded as well. The Mississippi Law Journal included a memorial note, “Remembering Dean Louis Westerfield,” while the Loyola Law Review published a collection of reminiscences titled “Remembering Dean Louis Westerfield: Thoughts from Friends, Colleagues and Former Students.”
Bill Quigley, a colleague at Loyola, wrote a widely cited appreciation in Black Issues in Higher Education (later republished online) that sketched Westerfield’s journey from his grandparents’ sharecropper cabin and his mother’s apartment in Fischer public housing to the deanships he held at three law schools.
How Institutions Remember Him
In the decades since his death, Westerfield’s name has become attached to scholarships, fellowships, awards, and conferences that link his personal story to ongoing efforts to diversify the legal academy.
At Ole Miss, the Louis Westerfield Memorial Scholarship in Law Endowment supports law students and appears in university scholarship lists alongside other memorial funds.
At Loyola, the Westerfield Fellows Program prepares aspiring law professors by giving them time for writing and experience teaching first year legal research and writing and appellate advocacy. The program’s description explicitly frames it as a pipeline for new scholars and notes that fellows teach under the guidance of experienced faculty.
The A. P. Tureaud Chapter of the Black Law Students Association at Loyola created the Dean Louis Westerfield Award, given to individuals whose “undying loyalty” to the chapter shows in their time, energy, insight, and support for Black law students.
Resumes and faculty biographies across the country now list time served as “Dean Louis Westerfield Fellow” at Loyola as a credential, from legal writing professors to scholars of critical race theory and civil procedure.
In Mississippi, the Magnolia Bar Association has hosted an annual Dean Louis Westerfield Judicial Symposium, and university timelines on integration and “Black firsts” routinely feature his 1985 tenure and 1994 deanship milestones. Reference works such as Black Firsts: 500 Years of Trailblazing Achievements and Ground Breaking Events repeat the De Kalb origin story and locate his deanship within a broader narrative of African American leadership in historically white institutions.
Why Louis Westerfield Matters for Appalachian and Southern History
For a site focused on Appalachian and upland Southern stories, a law dean from De Kalb might seem at first glance to lie off the usual map. Kemper County sits just south and west of the federally defined Appalachian region, but the social and economic realities of Westerfield’s early years would be familiar in many Appalachian hollers: sharecropping grandparents, limited educational opportunities, and out migration to industrial towns and cities.
His life also intersects some of the central themes of Appalachian and Southern history. He grew up in a landscape shaped by tenant farming and racial hierarchy. He navigated the move from rural county to urban housing project, mirroring the experiences of many Appalachian migrants who left coal camps and small farms for city factories and shipyards. He then used education as a ladder out of poverty, in institutions that were themselves grappling with how to respond to civil rights demands.
Most importantly, Westerfield’s story helps connect the history of Black education and professional leadership to the institutional history of universities that recruited heavily from Appalachian counties. Ole Miss law graduates have fanned out across the Appalachian South as prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys. The climate that Black students encountered in that law school in the 1980s and 1990s, and the presence of a dean like Westerfield, shaped the legal cultures of states from Mississippi northward.
To remember him is to remember that the struggle over who belongs in Southern courtrooms did not end with school desegregation orders. It continued, and continues, in hiring committees, fellowship programs, scholarship funds, and the quiet but powerful example of a dean who could look at a student from a poor rural county and see not “not college material,” but a future lawyer.
Sources & Further Reading
Louis Westerfield, “The Mens Rea Requirement of Accomplice Liability in American Criminal Law: Knowledge or Intent?” Mississippi Law Journal 51 (1980): 155 ff. SSRN+1
Louis Westerfield, “A Study of the Louisiana Sentencing System and Its Relationship to Prison Overcrowding: Some Realistic Solutions,” Loyola Law Review 30, no. 1 (1984): 5–86. Office of Justice Programs+1
Louis Westerfield, Louisiana Evidence (1st ed., Harrison Co., mid 1980s); Louis Westerfield and Bobby Harges, Louisiana Evidence, 2nd ed. (Norcross, GA: Harrison Co., 1992) with 1994 and 1995 supplements. LSU Law Digital Commons+2CABA+2
“Law School Dean Louis Westerfiel[d] Dies at 47; He Opened Doors for Minorities,” Times Picayune, 25 August 1996, via USGenWeb Louisiana newspaper archives. USGenWeb Archives+1
Associated Press, “Louis Westerfield, Black Law Dean, 47,” New York Times, 26 August 1996. Wikipedia+1
Hinds County Bar Association Newsletter, August 1994, profile and appointment notice for Dean Louis Westerfield. CABA
University of Mississippi School of Law, The Advocate yearbooks (1985, 1995, 1996), eGrove digital copies. eGrove+2eGrove+2
University of Mississippi, “Timeline of UM African American Experience,” entries “First Black Tenured Professor” (1985) and “First Black Dean” (1994), and 60 Years of Integration timeline. 60years.olemiss.edu+3eGrove+3eGrove+3
University of Mississippi Foundation, Foundation News (1995 and 1996 issues) and scholarship lists noting the Jimmy D. Shelton Scholarship in Law and the Louis Westerfield Memorial Scholarship in Law Endowment. umfoundation.givingfuel.com+3UM Foundation+3UM Foundation+3
Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, Law School Bulletin 1993–94, including masthead and “Story of Loyola / Goals of Loyola.” Internet Archive+1
North Carolina Central University School of Law, So Far: 60th Anniversary (1999), and Mary E. Wright, “Dean Louis Westerfield: In Pursuit of a Special Mission,” North Carolina State Bar Quarterly 37 (1990). NCCU School of Law Archives+2ncculaw.elsevierpure.com+2
Find A Grave memorial “Dr Louis Westerfield Jr. (1949–1996)” and related family entries, used with caution as genealogical pointers. Find A Grave+3Find A Grave+3Find A Grave+3
Bill Quigley, “Louis Westerfield, 1949–1996,” Black Issues in Higher Education 13, no. 16 (October 3, 1996): 25; and “Appreciation: Louis Westerfield, 1949–1996 – Obituary,” reprinted online at The EDU Ledger. Bill Quigley+2The EDU Ledger+2
“Remembering Dean Louis Westerfield: Thoughts from Friends, Colleagues and Former Students,” Loyola Law Review42 (1996): 405–411. Loyola Law School+2Loyola Law School+2
Black Firsts: 500 Years of Trailblazing Achievements and Ground Breaking Events, entries on Louis Westerfield’s birth in De Kalb, Mississippi, and his 1994 appointment as dean of the University of Mississippi School of Law. Dokumen+1
“Timeline: Black Firsts in Higher Education,” BlackOnCampus.com, entry for 1994 noting Westerfield’s appointment as the first African American dean at Ole Miss. blackoncampus.com+1
Loyola University New Orleans, “Westerfield Fellows Program” and related faculty biographies referencing service as a Dean Louis Westerfield Fellow. UDC Law School+6Loyola Law School+6Loyola Law School+6
Magnolia Bar Association and Black student groups’ announcements of the Dean Louis Westerfield Judicial Symposium and the Dean Louis Westerfield Award. Facebook+1