December 2003 - January 2004
Dean Heidi M. Hurd
David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy
Co-Director of the Program in Law and Philosophy
Telephone (217) 333-9857
hhurd@law.uiuc.edu
Dear Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Campus Administrators, and Friends,
The Fall semester is drawing to a close and exams are looming large--for both students and faculty! The College is infused with the nervous energy that is generated by exam preparation and holiday planning. The Library is always full, office hours are always busy, and end-of-semester deadlines dominate our collective psyche. But before we all enter the period of animated suspension that defines this time of year, it is surely worth taking stock of some of the semester's wonderful successes.
In this holiday message, I want to tell you about the latest:
• high-profile faculty promotions and appointments
• exciting student clerkship successes
• public service career opportunities and the new Loan Repayment Assistance Program
• fabulous bottom-line gains in fundraising
• energetic student initiatives
• legal research and writing innovations.
Faculty Promotions and Appointments
We have some very big news to share this month concerning faculty promotions and faculty appointments. First, in a packed-house ceremony presided over by Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Provost Richard Herman, our own Professor Tom Ulen was celebrated as the newest recipient of one of the campus' very prestigious Swanlund Chairs. As those who were present know, it was a marvelous occasion that paid tribute both to Professor Ulen's remarkable legacy as a founding father of the now-global law and economics movement, and to the College's mission as a leading center for cutting-edge, high-profile research that conceives of law as an academic "discipline" in the truest sense of that word.
Second, we are absolutely delighted to announce that Professor Lee Anne Fennell of the University of Texas School of Law has accepted our offer to join our permanent faculty next year. Professor Fennell joined the Texas faculty in 2001 after two years as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She earned her BBA from Baylor University in 1987, her JD, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center in 1990 (where she was also a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics), and her MFA from the University of Virginia in 1998. Before entering law teaching, she practiced with Pettit & Martin in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., with the State and Local Legal Center in Washington, D.C., and with the Virginia School Boards Association in Charlottesville. She has also been a Henry Hoyns Fellow in fiction writing at the University of Virginia and a Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fennell's teaching and research interests include Property, Social Welfare Law, State and Local Government Law, Education Law, Law and Economics (including Behavioral Law and Economics and Game Theory), and Law and Literature. Professor Fennell is an enviable "catch" for the College of Law, and we are absolutely thrilled at our good fortune.
Professor Fennell's appointment is testament to a very aggressive and very ambitious Fall appointments season that has been dedicated to building the College's scholarly and teaching strengths in areas that include (but are not exhausted by) Constitutional Law, Property, Civil Procedure, Torts, Intellectual Property, Evidence, and Professional Responsibility. Over the course of the past few months the Faculty Appointments Committee has brought 12 lateral candidates to the school for interviews, five of whom are women and three of whom are African-American. The faculty has, to date, made offers to three of these very impressive candidates, two of whom are women. Committee members interviewed 32 very promising entry-level candidates at the American Association of Law Schools' Faculty Recruitment Conference in Washington, D.C., including eleven women, four African-Americans, one Hispanic-American and one Pacific Islander. To date, the Committee has invited back seven entry-level candidates--three women, two African-Americans, and one Hispanic-American. We hope and expect that we will make more very exciting, highly-coveted hires this year, and we know that all of you will help us to deliver on our promise that this is a warm, supportive, engaging community in which ideas and friendships alike flourish.
Student Clerkships
After last year's extraordinary success in placing 100% of the 2002 graduating class (placing the College among only six schools in the nation able to boast such success), the energetic folks in the College's Career Services Office are working hard to ensure that our current students have a wealth of job opportunities that span the nation. The most salient news this month is that many of our students are having significant success in the judicial clerkship market, with eleven accepted circuit, district, and state court clerkships reported to date. With our students receiving more than 75 invitations to interview in jurisdictions all over the country, including seven federal appellate courts, federal district courts in 17 states, four state courts, and the Court of International Trade, we expect this to be a banner clerkship year for our students, and for the many courts that will be the beneficiaries of their talents.
Public Service Opportunities and the Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP)
As part of the College's efforts to enhance and expand our students' job opportunities, the College has hired a Director of Career Services, Stacey Tutt, who specializes in helping students find rewarding jobs in public service. But public service opportunities are not real opportunities to students who bear cumbersome debt loads; and as public school tuition mounts, our students are emerging with debts that make it financially difficult to pursue public interest practice. In an effort to ensure that students will have the financial freedom to go into public service (at average starting salaries of between $31,000 and $36,000 per year), College of Law students, alumni, and faculty have worked to create the Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP). Last month, the Program's Planning Committee launched its first fundraising event, generating contributions that will be applied toward partially or completely repaying the student loans of College of Law graduates who pursue careers in public service. The event, "Tip a VIP," was held at the Silvercreek restaurant in Urbana, and featured local celebrity waiters, including Illinois Representative Naomi Jakobsson, Dean Virginia Vermillion, Professor Amy Gajda, Professor Kit Kinports, local attorneys, and others. With a generous lead gift by alumnus William Van Hagey ('72), the fund will become active in the coming months and will begin to make more possible the public service ambitions of students presently enrolled at the College. For more information about LRAP, please see the November 12th article in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, which is available at the College's News link at www.law.uiuc.edu, and contact the Committee at lrap@law.uiuc.edu.
Fundraising Successes
I love to talk about the generosity of our alumni, without which we could not do all that we do--particularly in times of deep budget cuts. Contributions like Bill Van Hagey's lead gift to LRAP are making bold new things possible, even in the face of significant disinvestment by the state. This month I am absolutely thrilled to sum up our alumni's generous support with some stunning bottom line numbers. Relative to last year this time, the College's annual fund is up 41.4%! The total number of donors to all College funds is up 127.5%! And the total number of gifts that the College has received is up 104.9%! Kudos to the extraordinary efforts of the College's development team, and many thanks to all of our generous patrons for making these fantastic gains in pace possible.
Student Initiatives
One of the College's principal sources of pride is the remarkable diversity of its student body. This year's 1L Class boasts a minority student membership of 35%--up 9% from the 2002 entering class. This makes the College the leader within the Big Ten law schools for student diversity, and one of a handful of schools nationally to boast such a distinctive student mosaic. During this year, we commemorate the Supreme Court decision that made student diversity both a realizable goal and a commanding ideal. And to celebrate the decision and legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, the College's very active Black Law Student's Association (BLSA) has undertaken to organize an ambitious agenda of monthly events that relate to this landmark case. Thus, for example, BLSA recently hosted a showing of the award-winning documentary on the American Civil Rights Movement, Eyes on the Prize. Be sure to watch for, and calendar, the future events in this series (included in my monthly listing of College events).
As BLSA's activities and the LRAP initiative make clear, our students are constantly engaged in efforts that invigorate the College's internal culture. But one of the most remarkable aspects of that internal culture is our students' shared commitment to external volunteerism. For example, this month the SBA and the 1L Class sponsored a very successful and much appreciated Holiday Can Drive. With donations streaming in until the last few minutes of the competition, the three 1L sections (with a little help from section professors and alumni) collected over 2,500 cans and $1,200! Planned by SBA 1L Representatives Eugene Kim, Geeta Malhotra, Abby Ortman and Jordan Zucker, the cans and contributions were given to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank on behalf of the three sections. In addition, BLSA students volunteered as mentors at a local middle school and as workers for Habitat for Humanity; the Sexual Orientation & Legal Issues Society (SOLIS) participated in the Rainbow Coffee House and was involved in the Ally Network on campus; the Irish Law Students Association (ILSA) has launched fundraising efforts for its Spring service trip to Appalachia through a raffle that will be held at the 3rd Annual Guinness Toast on December 5 from 6-9 at Murphy's Irish Pub; the Organization for Advancing Legal & Strategic Opportunities (ALSO) sponsored a series of speakers on alternative careers in law; and the Latino/Latina Law Students Association (LLSA), the Asian American Law Students Association (AALSA), and BLSA held a very well-attended minority open house for undergraduate students interested in learning about law school and a life in the legal profession.
On the lighter side this Fall, the College of Law launched its inaugural Softball League. The league, established and managed by law student Jennifer Dulski, consisted of seven teams of law students and one team of College faculty and staff members. After the battles were done, the Red Team won first place in the league, with the Orange Team winning the tournament. This inaugural season had the students readily handling the more experienced faculty and staff, but the faculty and staff have vowed their revenge in the upcoming Spring league, and co-captains Professor Tom Ginsburg and Development Director Jeff Coates are already plotting strategy!
Legal Research and Writing
This month our legal writing faculty–Director of Legal Writing Shannon Moritz, Associate Director of Legal Writing Amy Gajda, and Visiting Assistant Professors George Mader, Michael Murray, Aylon Schulte and Michael Vogel–will award the Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal Awards for Excellence in Legal Research and Writing. These awards, which are funded through the generosity of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, honor the top student in each of the six, first-year legal research and writing classes for his or her outstanding demonstration of fundamental legal skills, including sophisticated research in both print and electronic sources and proficient drafting of office memoranda. (At the conclusion of the Spring semester, the top student in each of the six classes will receive Bell, Boyd & Lloyd Best Advocate Awards.) This year, as in past years, the selection of award winners is always a visible reminder of the very considerable talents of our students, and perhaps those talents will always be the best news that I will ever have to report.
And so with all this marvelous activity, and all these many accomplishments, the Fall semester at the College of Law draws to a close and the 2003 holidays loom large. I wish for all of you a very happy and restful holiday season, rich in the satisfactions of a year well-lived and full of the promise of another successful year to come. Thank you all--students, faculty, staff, alumni, and campus friends--for everything you have done this year to make the College of Law a warm and engaging place to become lawyers, to flourish as legal academics, and to call home as alumni.
Heidi M. Hurd
Dean, College of Law
David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy
Co-Director of the Program in Law and Philosophy
