Dale was born in rural Macon County, Alabama, in 1942. He attended a small, rural public school at Shorter, Alabama. After completing high school at Shorter in 1960, he attended Huntingdon College, a Methodist Church–related liberal arts college, in Montgomery, Alabama, where he majored in chemistry and minored in mathematics. The core curriculum included basic courses in religion and philosophy that instilled a lifelong love of philosophy in him. He served as president of the student government association while a student at Huntingdon.
After completing his work at Huntingdon in 1964, Dale began studying law at The University of Alabama that fall. When he finished his degree, he was in the top five percent of his 1967 law class, and took a job with Hill, Hill, Stovall and Carter, one of the leading law firms back in Montgomery. Although Dale continued to practice in Montgomery, after three years, he, his wife, Betty, and their sons moved back to their home county of Macon.
Dale was elected as a circuit judge in Alabama’s Fifth Judicial Circuit in 1982, a four-county rural circuit that includes Macon County and assumed office in January 1983. He continued in that office until January 2001. During his tenure as a circuit judge, Dale was deeply involved in judicial education, both as a student and a teacher. He received more than 500 hours of training in judicial education. He served on the Alabama Circuit Judge Continuing Education Committee for seventeen of his eighteen years on the bench, planning, participating in, and presenting judicial education. During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Dale participated in several law and literature courses. In 1995 and1996, Dale spearheaded and prepared curricula for two continuing educational events called Foundation in Pluralism, sponsored by Tuskegee University and the Alabama Judicial College. The first of these three-day events focused on the writings of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois; the second on writings of Dr. King and Malcolm X. The second of these two educational events received honorable mention as the best continuing education program in American colleges and universities. Dale described those events in Court Reporter, a magazine for judges. The National Association of Judicial Educators included that article, word for word, in its newsletter, and gave it widespread attention in judicial education circles. Dale earned a master’s degree in judicial studies from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1999. Upon leaving the bench in 2001, Dale established the Segrest Law Firm, reentered the law practice and continues Of Counsel with the firm.
Dale’s first book, Conscience and Command, which dealt with legal philosophy, was published in 1994 by Scholars Press. While writing that book, Dale realized that law is a faith-based social system, in that it depends on the faith of the culture for its effective force. So, after its publication, Dale began a study of faith and its functions. He has continually worked on the study that resulted in the present volume since the publication of that first book.
On his return to Montgomery, after completing law school, Dale became very active in Alumni work at Huntingdon College. He served as president of its National Alumni Board and received its Achievement and Loyalty awards. He became a member of the Board of Trustees at Huntingdon in 1982 and continued on that board until 2004. From 1995 until 1999, he served as chair of the board. Huntingdon awarded Dale an honorary doctorate degree in 1989.
In 1985, Dale was elected as conference lay leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, and he served in that office until 1990. He was elected to General and Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church in 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000. He was a lay speaker in the United Methodist Church for over forty years, and spoke in dozens of churches, well over one hundred. From 1996 until 2000, he served on a denomination-wide task force called the Connectional Process Team that studied the structure and ministry of the entire United Methodist denomination and made recommendations to the General Conference of the Church in 2000.
You can learn a great deal more about Dale Segrest by visiting his Website at the link shown on this page.