Alfred Avins, 64

Alfred Avins, a legal scholar, founder of two law schools and author of 80 law review articles and four books, died May 24 in Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., of pneumonia resulting from complications that began with surgery to remove a brain tumor in 1994. He was 64.

Dr. Avins long believed that legal education was too time-consuming and expensive to allow many to pursue the career, and as a result, he founded the Delaware Law School in Wilmington in 1971. However, within a few years, he ran into accreditation problems with the American Bar Association which also disagreed with Dr. Avins’ idea of offering legal education over weekends. An ABA team visited the school in 1974 and reported the school didn’t merit accreditation because of enrollment and library considerations. Dr. Avins was later forced to resign by the school’s board of directors. A new dean was able to merge the law school with a college in Pennsylvania and it was accredited shortly thereafter.

Dr. Avins went on to found the old District of Columbia Law School in 1977, but moved the school to Alexandria three years later after continuing conflict with the ABA. The school’s name was changed to Northern Virginia Law School, and in 1982, the Virginia Council of Higher Education authorized the school to confer the doctor of jurisprudence degree and it began graduating students that year. However, the ABA never approved accreditation of the school, and the Virginia Council of Higher Education withdrew its permission for the granting of the J.D. degree. The law school is graduating its last students this spring.

Dr. Avins earned his bachelor’s degree from City University of New York in 1954, an LL.B. from Columbia University, a master’s in law and a doctorate in law from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England.

He was a law professor at Memphis State University, an associate professor of law at Chicago-Kent Law School, assistant district attorney in Manhattan, staff counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and appellate attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. Before founding the Delaware Law School, he worked for the American Law Institute in Washington.

There are no immediate survivors.