Romaine at his desk in his office at Fordham's
School of Law in Manhattan, New York City

It is nice, at the age of 74, to hear this said about you by a woman 52 years your junior: “It’s amazing how he can recognize the big picture, stay calm and collected, and see so many issues in advance.”

That’s Erin Burke, a 22-year-old student at the Fordham University School of Law, speaking about Romaine L. Gardner, who at 74 can be said to be on a third career that combines two earlier ones. In the first he was a full professor of philosophy at Wagner College on Staten Island, New York. In the second he was a lawyer with a major New York firm, Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, and later with Paine Webber, the investment firm, now part of UBS Financial Services.

And now, having retired, he is putting to use the skills and experience acquired in both these occupations. He runs a clinic at Fordham Law School in which law students under his supervision provide free legal services to clients of modest means who have a strong case against their stockbroker but lack the financial resources to get redress. In some cases the students have succeeded in recovering for their clients a large portion of life savings that older, and often inexperienced or naïve, investors have lost.

The cases are resolved in arbitration proceedings because virtually all customers have contracts with their brokerage firm requiring the customer to submit disputes to arbitration. The clinic's clients cannot afford a lawyer and the dollar amount of their claims is too small for an attorney to take the case on a contingency basis.

To many a socially conscious law student the work of the clinic is highly satisfying and sometimes it points them in a career direction.

“I came in with the goal of helping people who have been wronged,” said Andrew Weisberg, a 24-year-old senior at the law school. “I had an interest in arbitration but I didn’t know much about it. His guidance has heightened my interest."

The work is no less satisfying to Professor Gardner, as the students know him. He commutes an hour to the school four or five days a week from his home on Staten Island. The trip is a few minutes longer than his commute to Paine Webber before his retirement in 1998, and the pay is nowhere near as high. No matter. Satisfaction derives from doing a service for students and clients alike.

Romaine does a lot of reading in a sitting room
filled with mementos in his Staten Island house

In the context of Romaine's entire professional life, his current job seems like a natural progression from a career that pointed at first toward the clergy. He was born in the tiny town of Wallingford, Iowa, 150 miles south of Minneapolis. His father was of English descent and his mother’s family was from Norway. They both grew up on a farm, as did Romaine. His mother became a schoolteacher and her favorite student was named Romaine. Hence her son’s name.

At St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, Romaine majored in philosophy and thought he was headed for the ministry. After graduation he went first to Luther Seminary in St. Paul, and then to The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He was ordained a Lutheran clergyman in 1958. But he wanted to be a professor, and for that he needed a Ph.D. The bishop assigned him to a parish in Queens, in New York City, so that he could go to graduate school part time. He enrolled at Columbia, and by 1960 he was working full time on his degree.

Meanwhile, he married Jane Elder Andrews of Colorado, and started raising a family. Jane got a job teaching dance at Wagner College. In 1963, two years before he got his Ph.D., Romaine started teaching there as well. He became a full professor six years later and the chairman of the philosophy department in 1973. “I loved the job,” he said.

He taught a course on the philosophy of law and became aware that there was no good textbook for undergraduates on the subject. He decided to write one. But for that he decided he needed some law courses.

So he enrolled in the evening division at Brooklyn Law School, never intending to become a legal practitioner. He enjoyed it so much that he stayed on for four years and wound up at the top of the class. Then he was offered a full-time job at Cadwalader, where he had served as a summer associate, with a salary that so far exceeded his academic income that he could not reject it. Wagner gave him a two-year leave of absence to try the new career.

All the while, he felt the pull of academia. “I’d always wanted to be a college administrator,” Romaine said. The idea had never left his mind since 1969, when he did post-doctoral work at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Michigan.

The opportunity to try this turned up unexpectedly. Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota, a Swedish Lutheran school 50 miles south of Minneapolis, invited him to become its dean. The family moved to Minnesota, but the job did not work out. “We were lonely there, and it was dull,” he said. And Jane disliked the cold weather.

In 1983 the family therefore returned to New York, bought a house in the Grymes Hill section of Staten Island, and Romaine went to work fulltime at Cadwalader. He stayed for four years.

The practice at Cadwalader centered on securities- and commodities-related litigation, involving multimillion-dollar corporate litigants. As many as a dozen lawyers would work on a single case and it would drag on for years. Looking for an opportunity to handle his own cases, Romaine eventually decided to move to Paine Webber where he was “handed 200 cases and told to handle them.” Most of them involved defending brokers in customer lawsuits.

Now he is on the side of the customer – but not any customer. At the Fordham Law School clinic care is taken to accept only clients who seem to have a valid case. “The cases we arbitrate are almost all cases where brokers failed to properly assess the risks involved in the investments they recommended to their customers with limited resources,” Romaine said. Brokers have an obligation to consider the suitability for their clients of the investments they recommend.

The smaller Norwegian boxes of Romaine's
large collection are displayed on the mantel

In one case a man in his late 60’s lost almost his entire life savings by making risky investments with the encouragement of his broker. He wound up almost penniless, and was forced to bag groceries to sustain himself. The clinic succeeded in recovering $75,000, almost half of his losses.

The arbitration proceedings are conducted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an entity created by the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Securities Dealers, which previously handled their cases separately. Typically three arbitrators are chosen for a case, two of them classified as “public” arbitrators and one as an “industry” arbitrator. Romaine himself has a classification of public arbitrator, and in that capacity he is currently involved in half a dozen cases.

The Gardner family is now dispersed. A married daughter in California has two children, and a married son lives in St. Paul. With family obligations light, Romaine has time for avocations as well as work. He is an avid antiques collector, especially of decorative Norwegian boxes. He has about 40 of them. Besides haunting antique shops, he likes to attend auctions. “We have a good place for this right on Staten Island, at Richmond Galleries on Castleton Avenue.”

He also spends time in civic activities. Until recently he was the president of the Greenbelt Conservancy on Staten Island, and he is an active board member of the Eger Lutheran Nursing Home there.

His retirement philosophy is clear and simple: “Always have something to do that gets you up in the morning.” He has never been lacking.