Wake County gets law school again

The big news in Raleigh today is Campbell University’s announcement that it is moving its school of law to Raleigh. The university’s Norman A. Wiggins School of Law will move from the Campbell campus at Buies Creek in Harnett County to a brick building in downtown Raleigh on Hillsborough Street just a couple blocks west of the Capitol.
It’s a coup for Raleigh, of course, but it’s also a big story for Wake County. The move returns a law school to Wake County for the first time in more than half a century. The old Wake Forest College School of Law in Wake Forest, N.C. moved to Winston-Salem in 1956 when the college packed up and took up quarters on a beautiful new campus in Forsyth County, thanks to a generous offer from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
There’s some symmetry to this current move: Norman Wiggins, for whom the Campbell law school is named, graduated from Campbell College when it was a two-year school, then earned his bachelor’s degree at Wake Forest College and a law degree from its law school – when the college was still in Wake Forest.
After earning a master’s degree and doctorate in law at Columbia, Wiggins returned as a law professor and general counsel at the new Wake Forest campus in Winston-Salem. In 1967 he became president of Campbell College, driving its growth, its name change to a university and creation of the law school, which was named for him in 1977. Wiggins died this summer, but discussions about a move to Raleigh had long been underway. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the name Norman Wiggins has accompanied the planned move of a law school to Wake County where Wiggins first got his legal training.