African-American students comprised barely one percent of the U.S. law school student population in 1968, the year that the American Bar Association (ABA) and the Association of American Law Schools asked Robert Summers to serve as a co-consultant in the founding of the Council of Legal Education Opportunity (CLEO). Summers, the McRoberts Professor of Administrative Law at Cornell, readily obliged.

"It seemed such an important branch of the civil rights movement and the cause was so compelling that we just pushed as hard as we could," he said.

Since then more than 8,000 students have participated in CLEO's pre-law and law school academic support programs. CLEO alumni can now be found in private law firms and corporations, law schools, federal and state judiciaries, and in legislative bodies across the country.

This year the program celebrates its 40th anniversary, and the ABA along with CLEO asked Summers to speak at a number of upcoming events, so it's been a good time for the Cornell professor to take stock and reflect on the program.

CLEO was originally founded as a nonprofit project of the ABA Fund for Justice and Education. The program's mission was to encourage and prepare aspiring minority and low-income students for law school and functions as a combination head-start program and placement service. CLEO participants attend a six-week summer school program at one of three program institutes. Work is periodically evaluated, and law schools are given the opportunity to conduct evaluations and interviews. Most CLEO participants attend law school following the institute.

In 1968, Summers' job was to do the necessary legwork to establish a teaching model and recruit universities and faculty into the CLEO program. He hardly knew how much legwork was actually ahead of him. More than 100,000 miles of air travel over three years as it turned out.

Along with legal colleague Robert O'Neil, then professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley, Summers said, "we went all over the country and exhausted ourselves" attending to the administrative nuts and bolts of CLEO. Their tasks included just about everything except fundraising. Along the way Summers and O'Neil encouraged Melvin Kennedy, an African-American professor of history at Morehouse College, to serve as CLEO's first executive director.

Summers can now look back with some pride on his pro bono work with O'Neil -- three years running with a full teaching load from 1968 to 1971 -- that helped to make American law schools accessible to minority and low-income students.

In building the initial CLEO curriculum, Summers and O'Neil drew on their experiences as co-chairs of the Association of American Law Schools' Committee on Teaching Law Outside Law Schools, holding summer teacher training institutes in Boulder, Colo.

"I had prepared teaching materials for basic undergraduate 'liberal arts' courses about law, a movement that got going in the universities and colleges of America in the late 1960s," said Summers.

CLEO's first summer institutes in 1968 followed a similar approach and enrolled about 160 students. Then next year there were 11 institutes enrolling 444 students.

"The curriculum for the institutes usually consisted of materials from first-year law school course materials, and sometimes from constitutional law," said Summers. "The idea was to give students a feel for what law is like, what law study is like, for what lawyers do and, above all, to encourage their interest in taking up law as a profession."

Judging by the results that idea -- and a lot of effort -- has helped to make CLEO a success story.

"I'm proud to have played a part in its founding," said Summers. "The program has had a considerable impact."