It was the late 1960s and Aviam Soifer, an undergraduate at Yale, was a student activist protesting the war in Vietnam. “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.
While learning to analyze issues like a lawyer lured 3L Jana Kovich to law school, leading the Student Bar Association – the student government – at Duke University School of Law anchored her to the school’s community, starting in her first year. “As any law student will tell you, 1L is hard,” Kovich said. “Participating in the student bar association allowed me to meet upper-level students and contribute to the law school outside the classroom.”
Teaching future lawyers a strategy that they can adapt to a variety of cases is Wes Porter’s mission as director of the Golden Gate University School of Law’s litigation center. Although the San Francisco law school has emphasized litigation for decades, the center that began when Porter started six years ago brings under one umbrella a coordinated panorama of doctrinal courses, extracurricular programs and real-world training to prepare future trial lawyers for the courtroom.
There is a certain satisfying 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 interweaving of the two strands have led to a career aimed at improving legal education.
The law has long beckoned to Beatrice Barenboim, but business has, until recently, held sway over her career. “Law is what I always wanted to do since I was a kid,” said Barenboim, who loves the critical thinking, the logic and the debate aspects of lawyering as well as the prospect of working with and for people.