Martin Brinkley ’92 has spent his career in rooms full of lawyers. On the morning of April 11, he walked into one carrying an oboe. 

That is not a metaphor. For the first time in UNC School of Law’s history, an eight-foot Bösendorfer grand was wheeled into the building. Brinkley, the dean emeritus, assembled a quintet — oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano — in the Rotunda.  The group played Mozart for roughly 60 of the School’s most loyal supporters.  It was a morning of gratitude. 

What he could not have planned was what came after. 

Before the quintet played, Brinkley stood up and offered what he insisted was not a lecture. He walked the room through 1784, the year Mozart turned 28, had lived in Vienna for three years after having been fired as a court musician by the Archbishop of Salzburg, and was grieving the death of an infant child. Out of the spring that year came the Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452, a piece Mozart told his father he considered the best thing he had ever written. 

Brinkley talked through each instrument’s place in the work with the ease of someone who has spent his life thinking about this. The clarinet was still a relatively new invention. The horn Mozart knew had no valves; players shaped every note with their lips alone. The bassoon had never before been treated as a true solo voice in an ensemble, and K. 452 changed that. 

Then he said something that had nothing to do with Mozart and everything to do with why the morning mattered. 

“In the end, music is always about death, even when death is not the theme.  The musician produces a living thing that begins to die the second it is born,” he told the room. “Compared to a musical note, the 24-hour life cycle of the mayfly is an eternity. When we hear something that is exquisite and life-filled, we have to be grateful for it, even in that one moment, because it will not last a second longer.” 

He sat down, picked up his oboe, and played. 

Brinkley was joined by Danny Jones, a UNC class of 2014 alumnus, former Kenan Music Scholar and Google software engineer who has kept the piano going through a career in tech; former dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School and UNC provost Jim Dean on clarinet; UNC senior Sam Brunetz on bassoon; and Wolfspeed engineer Matt Behrhorst  on horn. The Rotunda, a space that has hosted student board meetings, pickleball, and, just days earlier, the School’s Pro Bono Publico Awards, turned out to have perfect acoustics. 

After the last note, Chancellor Lee Roberts stood up and turned to Brinkley. 

The man who just played Mozart for an hour, Roberts told the crowd, is also the man who took Carolina Law from 45th in the country to the top 20. He ran a fundraising campaign that raised $78 million, doubling the previous law school record. He built the Law School’s Institute for Innovation and changed how the School trains lawyers, showing up in the classroom year after year. He became one of the most popular teachers in the building.  At this year’s commencement, the Class of 2026 will recognize him with the Frederick B. McCall Award for Teaching Excellence, an honor conferred by the graduating class for more than 50 years. 

“Ten years ago, we had a really good law school,” Roberts said. “Today we have a really great law school.” 

Then Roberts announced the creation of the Martin H. Brinkley Professorship of Law at Carolina Law — the School’s first professorship dedicated to corporate law, the field in which Brinkley practiced for more than two decades before coming to the Law School as dean in 2015. The campaign was led by Roger Perry ‘71, former Board of Trustees Chair and longtime volunteer fundraiser, and Wade Smith ’63, with Louise Harris, the School’s associate dean of development, driving the effort behind the scenes. Perry said they kept the circle deliberately small to protect the surprise. “I proposed the idea,” he said. “invited Wade to join me, and then Louise. Wade and I went on one visit and shortly there after, Louise called back and said she had the commitments. She handled everything else. She’s extraordinary.” 

The campaign crossed the University’s $1.5 million threshold for a named professorship in a matter of months, with a goal of $3 million. Donors present, in addition to Perry, included Bill ’79 and Andrea Bates, Anne and Walt Brown, Pat Brown ’86, Emmett ’82 and Hubert Haywood, the Kenan Charitable Trust in honor of Mary Gill Campbell ’84, Jim ’92 and Frances Kerr,  and Claudia and Jack ’75 O’Hale. Additional supporters whose contributions made the professorship possible include Liz Bower ’01 and Chris Washington, Greg ’04 and Stephanie Boyd, Jerry ’73 and Cookie Parnell, Roger ’71 and Linda Perry, Gray ’89 and Barbara Styers, David ’77 and Lyn Kirby, and Senator Tom Taft ’72. 

Brinkley stood in a rotunda full of people he had spent a decade serving as the room erupted around him. Outside, on a Saturday in April, the rest of the world went on as usual. Inside, a grand piano sat in a law school where no grand piano had ever been, and the people who filled that room had just made sure the man who brought them together would never be forgotten. 

If you would like to join the supporters of the Martin H. Brinkley Professorship, please contact Associate Dean for Advancement Louise Harris at louise.harris@unc.edu or use this link to give now.