A Look Back: Visiting Professor James Dente

Submitted by Phil White (J.D. '70)

This photo was taken 40 years ago in May, the last day of class. James M. Dente had come from Pennsylvania to UW College of Law to teach Dean Trelease's courses for one semester while the Dean was on sabbatical in Africa doing water law, if I remember correctly. Dente was always complaining that there were more sheep than people, and more sheep than legal precedents in Wyoming. So that led Sam Soule' and Ed Moriarity and other conspirators to award Dente a sheep, a cowboy hat and a square foot of Wyoming for grazing.  I was a stringer for UPI in those days and provided the photo to them for sending out on their wires. The photo appeared in the Pittsburgh Press.

I recently contacted Dente in Phoenix, AZ, who said he still treasured the article and photo in the Boomerang and the Pittsburgh paper. While at UW, he met Professor William Knudsen, who was also in his first year of teaching law at the time, after 19 years of practicing law in New York and Arizona.  Soule' says Knudsen read "Ode to a Ewe" by Dorothy Soule' at the presentation. 

After UW, Dente taught at the William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota for four years and was then lured to Lewis & Clark in Portland by Knudsen, who had gone there from UW. 

Dente taught at Lewis & Clark for 15 years and wrote a book for first-year torts students.

Knudsen also retired to Arizona but has now moved back to Oregon.  He is 86, still sharp as a tack and living in Lake Oswego, OR.  He remembers his three years in Laramie at the UW College of Law very fondly.