Gillian Lester, Columbia Law School’s 15th dean, arrives as law schools nationwide grapple with sliding enrollment and an over saturated job market. Equipped with first-hand experience in academic leadership — she was formerly the acting dean at University of California-Berkeley Law — she will help Columbia flourish “at a time of great challenge and opportunity,” the university’s president said.
Ward Farnsworth, the dean of the University of Texas School of Law, is a man of distinctive passions and choice words. All of which makes sense when you know that he devours old movies, barbecue and live music; loves baseball; is expert in rhetoric and chess, and is the author of “The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law,” whose tools he teaches students to use across practice areas.
The first-year class at U.S. law schools last fall shrank the least since numbers began dropping three years ago, amid improving U.S. economic growth and speculation that waning enrollment combined with retiring baby boomers would lead to a shortage of attorneys. Altogether, 37,924 students began working toward juris doctorate degrees at the 204 institutions accredited by the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the government-designated regulator for law schools. That marked a 4.4 percent drop from the previous year and a 28 percent slide since the historic high of 52,488 in 2010.
Kate Dewan was all business – literally and figuratively – when it came to choosing law as a career and the law school that would launch it. The 3L at St. Mary’s University School of Law in Texas had geared herself over the years for the jobs in marketing she thought she would enjoy and at which she knew she’d do well. And the jobs did come; the enjoyment did not. “I wasn’t using all my brainpower; I didn’t have to challenge myself,” Dewan said in a telephone interview. “I needed something more.”
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 academe suggests he may be more about following tradition in surprisingly unconventional ways. The pattern starts with his decision to become a lawyer, when he was 4 years old.
Joseph Rosati, a 3L at Albany Law School, was both smart and lucky when it came to earning a J.D. degree. He was smart in understanding the importance of size, location, cost of attendance and availability of scholarships. He was lucky in choosing a law school whose professors are top-notch teachers and recognized authorities in their fields, and whose classes emphasize practical skills.