Remembering Professor Judith Maute

Judith L. Maute, who served on the OU College of Law faculty from 1982 to 2014, passed away July 13, 2019. She taught numerous courses, including Professional Responsibility, Contracts, Lawyering in the 21st Century, Legal Malpractice, Gender-Based Discrimination, and Feminist Jurisprudence.

Professor Maute founded and served for six years as the director of OU Law’s student pro bono program, Students for Access to Justice, now called the Public Interest Law Students Association.

She wrote and lectured extensively, with special focus on legal ethics, legal history, contracts, and dispute resolution. She authored more than 20 publications. Her recent ethics scholarship concentrated on the evolution of lawyers’ pro bono responsibilities, system design for the delivery of legal services to under-served communities, and selection of state court judges.

Active in national academic and professional organizations, Professor Maute chaired the Section on Professional Responsibility and the Section on Women in Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools and served on the Multi-State Professional Responsibility Test-Drafting Committee and on law school accreditation site inspection teams for AALS and the American Bar Association. She also served on the Oklahoma Bar Association Rules of Professional Conduct Committee, the Access to Justice Committee, and the Standing Committee on Women in Law.

Prior to joining academia, she worked in private practice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and for the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1978 and earned her LL.M. from Yale University in 1982.

The family will receive friends from 4 to 8 p.m. on Friday, July 19, 2019, and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 20, 2019, at Havenbrook Funeral Home in Norman. A celebration of life service will be held at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 31, 2019, at St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church in Norman.

“Professor Maute was a committed teacher and scholar who was passionate about the responsibility of all lawyers to promote justice and its equal accessibility,” said OU Law Interim Dean Katheleen Guzman. “Her groundbreaking work in legal archeology surfaced the value of appreciating the ‘whole story,’ of assessing law in action – and continues to influence modern contract theory. Professor Maute engaged public service just as stoutly as she championed it. She will be missed.”