How Martin J. Katz ended up as a legal academic is an amusing story and a cautionary tale for aspiring law students,. The lesson: Lots of people will tell you how to get on a certain career track. You don’t need to listen to them.

Katz is dean and professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. As he tells it, he grew up thinking that he wanted to be a lawyer largely because his heroes were lawyers. “It seemed like lawyers solved problems, and I liked that,” Katz said in a telephone interview. “I wanted to be a problem solver.”

He was told that to be a lawyer, he should major in political science. But while he liked political science, he was much more drawn to economics, which is why he chose that as his major at Harvard. Economics majors go to business school, he was advised, and on into the world of business and finance. But a visit to business school classes left him cold. His father had gone to law school with Guido Calebresi, then dean of Yale.

“Guido said that even if I wanted to become an entrepreneur, which I was considering, I should seriously consider law school because that would be the best training in – guess what – problem solving,” Katz recalled. “He suggested that I visit some law school classes. I did and loved it. And I stayed.” Continue reading →

Anthony Crowell often refers to New York Law School as “New York’s law school.” The moniker is derived less from location than from a history of educating some of the city’s most influential citizens. The school’s president and dean since 2012, Crowell himself has long been a quietly influential figure in New York City government.

From 1997 to 2002, he served as assistant corporation counsel in the city Law Department’s Tax & Condemnation and Legal Counsel Divisions handling complex litigation, advising on constitutional questions, and drafting legislation and regulations for the mayor and city agencies. He turned in 2001 to assisting the families of the 9/11 attack victims as he directed the World Trade Center Death Certificate Program and was counsel at the city’s Family Assistance Center. He later served Mayor Michael Bloomberg as special counsel from 2002 to 2006 and counselor until 2012.

After sitting steps away from Bloomberg for more than decade, Crowell traded one of the toughest public sector lawyering jobs in America for what has become one of the toughest jobs in higher education – dean at a small independent law school. Speaking in a telephone interview and emails, Crowell said he came well prepared. Continue reading →

It was the late 1960s and Aviam Soifer, an undergraduate at Yale, was a student activist protesting the war in Vietnam and promoting co-education at Yale.

“Even then, I knew I wanted to teach,” said Soifer, now dean of the University of Hawai‘i’s William S. Richardson School of Law. Precisely what and where he wanted to teach was another matter.

Law was one of several alternatives, including American Studies, as Soifer, like almost all young men of that era, would lose his exemption from the draft upon college graduation. “I realized that going into legal academia – as a student and then as a teacher – would allow me to stay involved in public interest work and social activism,” Soifer said in emails and an interview. Continue reading →

There is a certain symmetry in the fact that Steven J. Kaminshine, dean of Georgia State University College of Law, entered law school to maintain his accreditation to teach, that he entered legal academia to sustain his love of law, and that the twining of the two strands have led to a career aimed at improving legal education.

Teaching came first. “I did the whole student-teacher program in college and then taught high school history right after graduating because I loved being in a classroom, working with students, making a difference in their lives,” Kaminshine said in a telephone interview.

To continue teaching, however, he needed a graduate degree, which meant he had to get a master’s degree in education or history, which he didn’t want. When he learned that a legal education would count, he chose law school. Continue reading →

Much of the legal career of Lucy S. McGough, Dean of Appalachian School of Law, has pivoted on her being in the right place at the right time with people who believed in her talents: her own choice to pursue a legal degree, for example, as well as her acceptance at Emory University School of Law.

As McGough (pronounced McG-you) recounted in a telephone interview, she was a student at Emory University in Atlanta heading for a Ph.D. in English – until she ran into a woman who had graduated three years earlier and was in the midst of the same degree. The subject of the woman’s proposed dissertation: a minor British poet, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, he of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame.

“That’s when I decided against devoting my life to something that seemed so narrow and arcane,” McGough said. “I wandered over to the Emory law school and ended up talking with Ben Johnson, the dean, who on his own authority could and did offer me a place there. He told me, ‘Go for it. And by the way, you start on Monday.’” She was one of three women in the entire law school. Continue reading →

Annette Clark, dean of the Seattle University School of Law, understands more than most the importance of a good fit in careers and law schools.

Coming from a “medical family,” and interested in the sciences, Clark’s dream was to become a doctor. Then came the third year of medical school and work in clinical and hospital settings. Continue reading →

The career-turning points for María Pabón López, the dean of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, came in the form of a person and a job.

The person “was an Italian American woman, a lawyer for the teacher’s union who took the time – and had the ability – to explain how the law affects people in their everyday lives,” López said in a telephone interview. This was during her year as a science teacher in New Jersey, right after graduating from Princeton. “I knew right then that I wanted to be that woman,” López said. “So I went to law school.”

The job was as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Criminal Division, for the District of Puerto Rico, where her parents were born and the family’s home for many years. “I was actually prosecuting immigrants for marriage fraud, re-entry after deportation, for a host of immigration-related issues that compelled me to better understand what was going on,” she said. Continue reading →

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 →