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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Eduardo Peñalver’s social activism started started long before he led Cornell classmates in their 1993 takeover of the university’s administrative office building: His parents had taken him on their protest marches at nuclear submarine bases in Washington State. His resulting drive for social transformation led him to law school, legal academe and now, to the position of dean at Cornell Law.