Spartan Lawyer Winter 2018

FACULTY

TRUSTING FUTURE GENERATIONS

Associate Dean Charles Ten Brink teaches estate planning to MSU Law students. Outside the classroom, part of his personal estate includes a planned gift to MSU Law.

“I have worked here a long time, and I feel strongly about preserving the quality of legal education – particularly here at Michigan State,” Ten Brink said.

He never expected to be an MSU Law librarian. Nearly 20 years ago, Ten Brink was associate director of the D’Angelo Law Library at the University of Chicago. “I made the joke sometime in the early 90s to the effect of, ‘the only job that could possibly entice me away would be a position as the law librarian at Michigan State’,” Ten Brink said. At the time, there was no law library at MSU, so it seemed like a daydream. But just a few short years later, he heard about MSU and DCL’s affiliation.

“We’re still doing what librarians did in the library at Alexandria. We collect information, we preserve it, we disseminate it, we interpret it. The mechanisms for doing that are in a constant state of flux, but if you keep your eye on the basic principles, it’s really all about working with people.”

“Then suddenly, there was a law library at Michigan State University,” Ten Brink said. “And there was an opening for the director position. So I applied for it, and I was delighted to get it.”

Ten Brink completed his undergraduate education at MSU, and several of his family and friends live in Michigan. The new job felt, in some ways, like a homecoming. But it was also a chance to be part of something entirely new.

“It was a law school that had been around for a very long time, and it was in the business of remaking itself. It was just beginning to hire a lot of new faculty, library services were fundamentally changing – the nature of library collections was fundamentally changing – so it was an exciting opportunity,” Ten Brink said. He is well aware of how life leads to unexpected change. To that end, he intentionally left the legal language of his planned gift as open-ended as possible.

“I’m always a little put out with the cases in trusts and estates courses where people imagine that future generations will see things exactly the way that you do. It strikes me as short-sighted. You should imagine that future generations will be people acting with good intentions under circumstances you can’t begin to imagine. You want to provide them with flexibility and hopefully the resources to react in a way that preserves core values, not specific iterations of those values at any given point in time,” Ten Brink said. In the spirit of that goodwill and trust, Ten Brink hopes his planned gift will help future generations meet the unique challenges they will face.

Charles Ten Brink is Associate Dean for Library and Technology Services and Professor of Law.