If perseverance, selfless service and a can-do approach to personal growth are Rachel Van Cleave’s watchwords – as even brief conversations with the Golden Gate University School of Law dean confirm – then the veterans of the Bay Area and their military values are her touchstones and guides.

“Veterans bring with them a wealth of leadership knowledge, particularly in the face of great adversity,” Van Cleave said in e-mails and a telephone interview. “Through them I’ve come to recognize that mindfulness, humility and grit are what generate true leadership adaptability. Because of them I’m continually working to apply this lesson in my own small way.”

One result? “I’ve learned that we can’t always have the answers, but with the right mindset and an excellent team, we can find some pretty good – maybe even very good – solutions,” she said.

That she has such a team in her faculty, staff and advisers, she said, enables her to see what are arguably troubled times for law schools including Golden Gate as a “transformative opportunity for legal education that can only benefit students.” Continue reading →

Ward Farnsworth, the dean of the University of Texas School of Law, is a man of distinctive passions and choice words. He devours old movies, barbecue and live music; loves baseball; is expert in and written books about rhetoric and chess, in addition to torts, civil procedure, contracts and admiralty law; and is the author of The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law, whose tools he teaches students to use effectively across practice areas.

Farnsworth’s path into lawyering and legal academia is less that of a directed careerist and more of a polymath who, unable to decide among his many interests, discovered that he need not choose if he pursued law. “Law school is great for people who want to think about everything,” he said in an e-mail exchange. Continue reading →

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.”

Continue reading →

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 →