Michael Wolff’’s journey to the Saint Louis University School of Law makes for both a good yarn and an illustration of how smarts and serendipity contribute to the making of a law dean.

Graduating from Dartmouth College, where he was editor of “America’s oldest college newspaper” (founded 1799), Wolff eschewed journalism for a law career, though he worked for what was then the Minneapolis Star throughout his University of Minnesota Law School years. “I thought I’d have more autonomy as a lawyer,” he said in an interview. Continue reading →

Turns out that Nick Allard was a kind of stealth appointment as dean of Brooklyn Law School in 2012. Not that he or the law school’s board of trustees planned it that way. A consummate Washington, D.C., lawyer and lobbyist – Allard was for more than 20 years a partner at Latham & Watkins and then at Patton Boggs, chairing government relations and public policy groups at both firms – he has delivered on his obvious government, agency and institutional connections. Continue reading →

The job of law dean, as Gary Myers sees it, is mostly about constituencies and collaborative relationships. “I only wish I had realized in advance how many different constituencies we serve beyond the obvious ones – students, faculty, staff and alumni,” Myers, dean of the University of Missouri School of Law, said in an interview.

Every interaction, he said, allows him to move beyond a limited connection to a long-term alliance that will benefit the law school. It’s a multitasking challenge, Myers said, in which he is sometimes “learning by doing.” Continue reading →

Consider this: What would Aristotle, the fourth-century Greek philosopher, have in common with a successful 21^st-century tax lawyer? If your first guess was “nothing,” you were wrong.

Philosophers and tax attorneys share an ability to think analytically, to read language critically and to grasp its meaning, to build a logical argument and counter an adversary’s.

That’s the premise of Patricia White, dean of the University of Miami School of Law, who studied both fields at the University of Michigan, earning a master’s degree in philosophy and a juris doctorate in 1974. Continue reading →

Martha Minow. Photo by Ken Richardson.

Martha Minow can’t say “no” when it comes to working for people on society’s margins – typically members of racial and religious minorities, women, children, people with disabilities. Even when she insists that she knows nothing about the specific subject – refugees, for example, or Kosovo – the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law of Harvard Law School ends up as the co-chair or co-creator of some targeted, outcomes-based human rights initiative. Continue reading →

At the heart of the University of Toledo College of Law is the faculty – at least as far as one former member of that band of academics is concerned.

“I went to Yale Law – obviously a number of years ago – but I still can say without hesitation that we have better teachers here than I had then,” said Daniel J. Steinbock, a faculty stalwart since 1985 and the school’s dean since 2010. “They are noteworthy scholars. They are remarkable in the classroom. And they care.” Continue reading →

Rick Bales says he’s in the enviable position of leading a personalized legal education program at a niche institution in a shrunken law student market. Bales is the dean of Ohio Northern University College of Law, where, he said, faculty and staff know every member of the entering class, which this academic year, like the last, won’t exceed 80. Continue reading →