Matthew J. Wilson, dean of The University of Akron School of Law, says he’s “all about non-tradition.” Tracing Wilson’s path to and through legal academia suggests he may be more about following tradition in surprisingly unconventional ways.

Start with his decision to become a lawyer. He was 4 years old and a Sunday regular at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Afterward, I would travel this route to some neighbors’ houses – including Donny and Marie Osmond’s grandparents and a widow named Alice – to talk,” Wilson said. “I loved to talk.”

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Penelope Andrews, president of Albany Law School of Union University, moved into legal academia in the mid-1980s because of both identity and circumstance: She was a black woman from South Africa, at Columbia Law on a student visa and completing her degree during the height of apartheid.

“The South African government had declared a state of emergency,” Andrews said in a telephone interview. “Despite a job offer, I couldn’t get a green card and I feared that I’d be arrested if I returned home. Happily, a Columbia law professor suggested I teach in a law school somewhere in the British Commonwealth.” Continue reading →

If there is one subject in which Patricia Salkin is fluent – even more, perhaps, than the land use laws on which she is an expert and the intersection of law and governmental affairs where her experience is longstanding – it’s the lives and life stories of her students at the Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center.

And if there is one thing that infuriates and energizes Salkin, the dean, it’s that the data used to recommend a law school (or not) don’t reflect the true quality of the education her students receive and the opportunities available to them. Continue reading →

The story of Douglas J. Sylvester, dean of Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, comprises brinksmanship, gratefulness and the road nearly missed, but not for lack of trying. Continue reading →

Eduardo Peñalver’s social activism started long before he led Cornell classmates in their 1993 takeover of the university’s administrative office building. It was an effort to elicit more university support for Hispanic students after racial slurs and a swastika were scrawled across a Hispanic artist’s work on campus.

“Both my parents were involved in the nuclear freeze movement in Seattle,” Peñalver, the dean of Cornell Law School, said in a telephone interview. “I remember them driving the whole family to Bangor, Washington, to march and protest at the nuclear submarine base there. They were real activists, believers in working toward social transformation.” Continue reading →

Michael M. Martin’s relationship with Fordham Law School began with a love affair and ended up as a love affair. Here is how Martin, the dean since 2011, explained it:

“I had completed my own education – undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Iowa, then off to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar – and was teaching at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle. That’s when I met the woman to whom I’ve been married for 43 years. Ellen was from New York and we decided to move there. Continue reading →