Monthly Archives

December 2014

Dean Limelight: Penelope Andrews, Albany Law School

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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. Happily, a Columbia law professor suggested she teach law in the British Commonwealth, rather than return home, where she feared arrest amid a state of emergency declared by the South African government. She walked into her first teaching assignments in Australia, and so began the passion she calls a career.

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Law Student Limelight: Touro Law's Alanna McGovern

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Alanna McGovern, a 3L at the Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, is among that rare breed of people who have wanted to be lawyers for as long as they can remember. So long that her family members – truck drivers, medical technologists, nurses, police officers but no lawyers – initially dismissed it as the babbling of a 4-year-old. That’s right, 4-year-old.

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Dean Limelight: Patricia E. Salkin, Touro College Law Center

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If there is one thing that Patricia Salkin knows – better, perhaps, than the land use laws on which she is expert and the intersection of law and governmental affairs where her experience is longstanding – it’s the life stories of her students at Touro College’s Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. And if there is one thing that infuriates and energizes Salkin, the law center’s dean, it’s that the data used to recommend a law school (or not) – don’t reflect the quality education her students receive and the opportunities available to them.

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Dean Limelight: Douglas J. Sylvester, Arizona State University Law

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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. “I loved learning new things, but my undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto felt so unreal, except for the joint law and political science classes I took during my last two years,” he said. “They made me realize that in law the matters you deal with affect real people: The unfairness, the injustice– it’s all real. I knew I’d love law school from day one.”

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Law Schools Scrutinize Bar Exam After Record Drop in Scores

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The largest drop in bar exam scores in almost 40 years has virtually everyone involved asking whether it occurred because of the test or the test-takers. A group of law school deans has asked the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which administers the test, to turn over its data for an independent expert examination. The 83-year-old not-for-profit is conducting its own review in the meantime, but has so far found nothing to indicate the exam, given in July, was flawed.

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Law Student Limelight: Cornell Law School's Nora Ali

By | Campus Features, Student Limelights, Uncategorized | No Comments

Nora Ali, a 3L at Cornell Law School, knows the value of finding the right fit in a law school. Not because Cornell helped her secure an interview with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, the prestigious firm where she will be working after graduation. But because after a near disastrous first semester, Cornell enabled her to marshal her intelligence and abilities, and reverse the fall.

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