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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIBJ co-owner Michael Maurer’s $35 million gift to the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington is the fourth largest
from an individual in the history of the university.
All the gifts larger than Maurer’s were given this decade. The largest was a $77 million gift from the estate of Carmel entrepreneur
Jesse Cox. Cox died earlier this year. That gift pays for the Cox Scholars program, which was started in 2005. The second-largest
gift was $50 million in 2006 from real estate developer Melvin Simon and his wife, Bren, for the IU Cancer Center,
which opened earlier this year. In 2005, the estate of David and Barbara Jacobs gave $40.6 million to what is now the IU Jacobs
School of Music.
Maurer’s gift, announced Dec. 4, is the largest in the law school’s history to come from a single donor. It will fund an undetermined
number of scholarships. Because the donation comes during IU’s $1 billion Matching the Promise fund-raising campaign, the
university will match investment income from the gift in perpetuity. In honor of the gift, the law school is now known as
the Michael Maurer School of Law at Indiana University.
"I have always thought I had a duty to give back," said Maurer, who graduated from the law school in 1967. He said
he received
a small academic scholarship in his second year and went on to a 20-year career practicing "any kind of law that had
to do
with numbers." Maurer, 65, founded the Carmel law firm Maurer Rifkin & Hill PC but no longer practices.
Maurer will make his donation over time, with an undisclosed portion coming from his estate after his death.
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