It seems that re-naming George Mason University School of Law to honor the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia has created something of a financial windfall for the school. Initially, it received $30 million to make the change. Just recently, it received $50 million more. It was the biggest gift in the university’s history.
The bequest comes from the estate of the late Judge Allison M. Rouse and Mrs. Dorothy B. Rouse. The largest gift received in George Mason University history, it will create a permanent endowment — the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Endowment — to support 13 new faculty chairs of approximately $4 million each.
“We are grateful for this generous gift from Mrs. Rouse,” said Scalia Law School Dean Henry Butler. “Judge Rouse and Justice Scalia were both appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, and Mrs. Rouse was an enthusiastic fan of Justice Scalia. Mrs. Rouse was proud to leave a legacy that supports the lasting scholarship and jurisprudence of Justice Scalia.”
Rouse was appointed by Reagan, then the governor of California, to serve as an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal in San Francisco in 1971. He retired from the bench in 1988 and worked for a decade as a private judge and arbitrator before he died in 2005 at the age of 86. Mrs. Rouse was born in San Francisco, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1946, and earned her law degree in 1949. She died in May 2018 at the age of 93.