William L. Prosser served in the
United States Marine Corps during
World War I.After the war, he also served as a guard at the US Embassy in
Brussels,
Belgium After spending his first year at Harvard Law School, Prosser transferred to and received his law degree from the
University of Minnesota Law School. After a brief time in private practice at Dorsey, Colman, Barker, Scott & Barber (the modern-day
Dorsey & Whitney), he became a professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he wrote
Prosser on Torts. He taught there from 1931 until 1940, when he resigned to become the Minnesota counsel for the Roosevelt Administration's
Office of Price Administration. In 1943, he returned to private practice for another four years. In 1947, Prosser returned to Harvard Law School as a professor. The following year, Prosser became Dean of the
School of Jurisprudence at UC Berkeley. The unusual name of Berkeley's law school was a leftover from its beginnings as an undergraduate department, but had not been changed because of existing statutory language designating the
Hastings College of Law as the
University of California's "law department." After Prosser learned that
UCLA had been able to get legislative approval for its
own "school of law" (notwithstanding the Hastings statutory language), he decided that Berkeley could also get away with having its own school of law and set about getting the school renamed. However, he was also "conservative and pragmatic", and saw no reason in 1949 why anyone should object to taking a
loyalty oath. He enjoyed the company of deans L. Dale Coffman at UCLA Law and David E. Snodgrass at Hastings, who shared his conservative views. By 1960, Prosser's "irascible" and "authoritarian" personality traits were becoming evident. He suddenly announced his resignation, effective immediately, in the middle of the 1960–1961 school year rather than face a regular five-year review of his deanship before the campus Budget Committee, then had to be talked into finishing the school year while the university searched for his replacement. On the way out, he could not resist taking potshots which confirmed his personality flaws, marred his legacy at Berkeley, and were regarded as an unfortunate coda to an otherwise successful deanship. In oral remarks before the faculty, he attacked the institutional weakness of the dean of the law school by calling himself "a straw man, a stooge, a tailor's dummy, and a figurehead, without any authority or power whatsoever". He also made similar comments in a written memorandum to the faculty: "This, of course, is faculty self-government, which is a fetish in this University beyond all others. It is democracy in action. It is also one hell of a way to run a railroad." Upon leaving Berkeley in 1961, Prosser became a member of the faculty at Hastings and continued to teach law there until his death in 1972. == Prosser and strict products liability ==