Allen Cox. Source: https://www.coastalview.com/obituaries/allen-howard-cox-iii/article_1aba4a48-3653-11ea-88de-cb3314b9c03c.html
University of California, Berkeley. Photo: Gku, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berkeley_glade_afternoon.jpg)
University of California, Berkeley. Photo: Gku, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berkeley_glade_afternoon.jpg)
Allen Howard Cox was born on October 12, 1941, in Seattle, Washington. Seattle is a port city on Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, and his career later developed mainly in California.
He graduated from Carpinteria High School in 1959 before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley. Carpinteria is a coastal community in Santa Barbara County, California, and his move from there to the Berkeley campus marked the start of his university education.
Cox received a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. The University of California had been chartered in 1868 as the state's public university system, and Berkeley became its flagship campus.
He then studied at Hastings College of the Law. The school began in 1878 as a department of the University of California and was the state's earliest law school. The American Bar Association approved it in 1939. Cox earned his Juris Doctor in 1967 and served as an associate editor of the Hastings Law Journal in 1966 and 1967. That journal, which started in 1949, is the oldest law review at the school.
His academic honors and affiliations included recognition from the Order of the Coif, along with membership in Phi Alpha Delta and the Thurston Society. The Order of the Coif is a national scholastic honor society for law, formed in 1912 to promote legal scholarship and recognize high grades. Phi Alpha Delta, founded in 1902, draws its membership from law students, legal educators, and practicing lawyers. At Hastings, the Thurston Society has admitted students ranked near the top of their classes by grade point average.
Cox's legal career began in California, where he was admitted to the State Bar of California on December 21, 1967. The State Bar is the state agency responsible for licensing and regulating California's attorneys, so admission was the prerequisite for practicing law in the state.
He later became a partner at Jordan Keeler & Seligman, a San Francisco firm whose practice is associated with business organizations and estate planning. His own practice covered business organizations and matters involving employee pensions and benefits. An obituary describes him as a corporate lawyer and firm partner who retired in 2014 after more than 35 years of practice. His State Bar license later became inactive.
Cox belonged to the State Bar of California, the Bar Association of San Francisco, and the American Bar Association. The State Bar regulates the legal profession in California, and his admission to it in 1967 linked him to the state's licensed lawyers. The American Bar Association, founded in 1878, is the national professional association of American lawyers. The Bar Association of San Francisco serves attorneys practicing in the city.
