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Brigadier General
Christopher H. Munch
Permanent Professor 1959–1967
B.S., United States Military Academy
J.D., University of Illinois
Chris Munch, the Academy’s 6th Permanent Professor, was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, in 1921. He attended Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, PA, for a year prior to entering the United States Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1943. He earned his pilot wings, but was soon grounded for medical reasons. In 1945 he was sent to Columbia University for a graduate course in English preparatory to going back to West Point as an Instructor of English, 1946–1947. Moving to the Air Force in 1947, Chris was selected for Law School but was sent first to work in the legal office at Chanute AFB, IL. He entered the University of Illinois Law School in 1948. He earned his Juris Doctor in 1951 and was assigned to Headquarters Fifth Air Force, Korea, as Staff Judge Advocate. A year later he was sent to the Philippines as the Staff Judge Advocate for HQ 13th Air Force. In 1955 Chris Munch was assigned in the initial faculty cadre of the Air Force Academy as Assistant Professor of Law, with the additional duty as the Academy Staff Judge Advocate. However, he was recalled to the Philippines for a year to assist in preparations for base rights negotiations. He returned to the Academy in 1957 as Professor and Head of the new Department of Law, still with the additional duty as Academy Staff Judge Advocate. At that time, the curriculum had only a single law course Elementary Law and Criminal Evidence. Chris oversaw the development of the course and wrote much of the text himself. In 1959 he was made a Permanent Professor. He continued to lead the Law Department for seven years until 1966, when he was sent on sabbatical as a Visiting Professor to the University of Denver Law Center. He retired from the Air Force in 1967. He was one of the retired Permanent Professors promoted to brigadier general, retroactively, in the early 1990s.
Following retirement Chris took the position as the University of Denver Law Center’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, an office he held until 1980. After leaving his administrative position in the Dean’s office, he continued to teach in the DU College of Law until 1995, when he retired as Professor Emeritus. Chris came out of retirement to help establish the School of Law at Chapman University, Orange, CA. He specialized in contracts, patents, trademarks, and copyrights. In 2001 DU established the Chris Munch Summer Institute on Intellectual Property for students to explore this rapidly expanding field of the law. He died in Denver in 2008.