accreditation from the American Bar Association. Brickman learned, three days before the accreditation team's site visit, that the paperwork for the crucial procedure was incomplete. He said of this later that "If we had not gotten our accreditation, or if it had been postponed, half our student body would have transferred, faculty would have left, and we would have been permanently barred from the upper echelon of law schools." A photo of Brickman taken at the 1982 celebration of the Cardozo's ABA final accreditation shows the acting dean wearing an impeccably-tailored three-piece suit and an expression of grim relief. His emergency-management challenges were not over, however. The Cardozo's liberal origins and left-leaning faculty had attracted a significant contingent of what Brickman later called "Berkeley '60s-type students." He recounted to Gary Goldenberg in 2002 that the editors of the student newspaper "and others had decided that the law school was not sufficiently diverse." Without resources to remedy what he and other faculty recognized as a defect, Brickman responded to the student plans for a highly-publicized protest rally with the threat of a libel suit. The students backed down. The Cardozo offered him the deanship on a permanent basis, but Brickman declined, remarking later both that he felt the school would be more successful with leadership brought in from outside, and that the acting deanship had been "an enormous strain on me personally." Monroe E. Price, a former law school faculty member of the University of California at Los Angeles, succeeded him as dean in July 1982, concluding what Gary Goldenberg dubbed "the Brickman interregnum." The overwhelming demands of the Cardozo's early struggles on Brickman's intellectual resources and personal energies are reflected in his curriculum vitae, which lists no publications at all in the years 1977 through 1987, the longest such gap in his career since his first publication as a college freshman in 1958. In 1976, Brickman's first year at the Cardozo, four publications by him had appeared, including a co-authored and edited issue of conference proceedings with Richard O. Lempert, but he published nothing further until 1988. Tort reform Nonrefundable retainers When Brickman was able to return to his scholarship, his next publication was his first—and successful—proposal for reform of the American legal system, and for stricter enforcement of traditional legal ethics. With his former student Lawrence A. Cunningham, at this writing (summer 2016), Henry St. George Tucker III Research