Reflections from the Dean of Northwestern Law
Welcome friends of Northwestern University School of Law. I hope you will enjoy these observations about our Law School, about legal education and the rapidly changing legal profession, and about (on a somewhat lighter note) the adventures of a new transplant to the City of Big Shoulders.
I welcome your feedback: daniel.rodriguez@law.northwestern.edu
NU graduation highlights
The Chicago Theater was the venue for a great convocation ceremony yesterday afternoon.
I congratulated our graduates, thanked them for all their contributions to our community, and spoke briefly what it means to be “ready.” NU’s president, Morty Schapiro, spoke about the importance of friendship and of maintaining friendships forged in law school in the face of the business of ordinary life.
At many times in the ceremony, we remembered our beloved colleague, Dawn Clark Netsch ’52, who we lost earlier this year. In one of the especially moving parts of the convocation, Dawn’s nephew, Sandy Kerr, accepted the Childress teaching award, an award whose recipient is selected by the graduating students, on Dawn’s behalf posthumously. Sandy also presented the student awards, including the Wigmore Key (to Timothy Fry).
Our convocation speaker was Mark Walter ’85. Mark is the principal owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and is a principal in Guggenheim Partners. He provided remarks on the value of law school, putting in special context the story of how he and his partners recently came to own the Dodgers (paying a record-setting amount for what has emerged as an fertile investment).
For me, a highlight of the ceremony were the two speeches of our students, a JD and LLM graduate. Jeff Van Dam and Sergio Herrera gave interesting, humorous remarks about their experiences at Northwestern. Both emphasized in their own ways how remarkable a group of students we have at Northwestern and how the best of NU Law is found in these incredible students.
(I must also mention that Jeff, referring to comments I made in my remarks about my dog, Rico Sauve, said that he knows my dog and that “Rico is a terrific individual”). Can’t top that!
Thanks to all who made this graduation such a meaningful event for friends and family, for faculty and administrators. And best of luck to the Class of 2013. Make us all proud!
Graduation 2013!
I am proud and excited to preside over the convocation for our esteemed Northwestern Law class of 2013.
To the students: congratulations and Godspeed.
The the faculty and staff: thanks for all you have done to bring our students to this great day.
To the family and friends: congrats to you also and thanks, on behalf of our students, for all you have done to prepare and support these terrific individuals.
NU Law receives a $3 million gift for a faculty chair
Northwestern Law School is pleasured to announce that Howard and Elizabeth “Betsy” Chapman have made a $3 million gift to establish a chaired professorship in their name. “This is an important gift,” said Dean Daniel Rodriguez. “The Chapman’s generosity helps further our goal of recruiting and retaining an exemplary group of scholars and teachers. We are extremely grateful for this vote of confidence in our bold ambitions, especially in the business law area.”
Howard’s understanding of the importance of legal and regulatory structures on the business community was instrumental to establishing this professorship. This understanding was the result of a life of practice in banking and finance, corporate, and real estate law.
Howard attended Northwestern University on an academic scholarship. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1956 and went from there to the Law School—again on an academic scholarship—where he was an associate editor of the Northwestern University Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif.
Howard and Betsy met at Northwestern, which she attended from 1953 to 1955. They married in 1955. Following Howard’s graduation from the Law School in 1958, they moved to her hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Howard began his long and distinguished career in the law.
In 1958 Howard joined Shoaff, Keegan & Baird; he became a partner in 1963. In 1970, he helped establish the firm of Bonahoom, Chapman & McNellis, which merged in 1986 with Barrett, Barrett and McNagny to form Barrett & McNagny, one of Indiana’s largest law practices. He was a partner at that firm until he became Of Counsel in 2003. Howard served as president of the Allen County Bar Association, and on the boards of the Waterfield Mortgage Company and the Union Federal Bank of Indianapolis.
Betsy, an accomplished musician, has performed at the Arena Theatre, the Fort Wayne Youtheatre, and the First Presbyterian Theatre. She earned a degree in English from Indiana University-Purdue in 1974. She has coauthored three musical plays for children, which have been performed nationally, and she has served on the boards of numerous community and charitable organizations, including the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, and Arts United of Allen County.
Together, the Chapmans have a distinguished history of giving and volunteering. They established the Howard and Betsy Chapman Law Scholarship Fund to support students at the Law School, as well as the Chapman Scholars program and the Chapman Distinguished Professorship in the Department of English and Linguistics at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Howard served on a Law School Reunion Committee, and as an officer, director, and committee member of many civic and charitable organizations in Indiana.
Their philanthropy is not limited to Northwestern; they support organizations including the Community Harvest Food Bank, Purdue University, the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, and the United Way.
Howard is thankful for the scholarships that made it possible for him to attend Northwestern. Through their philanthropy, Howard and Betsy support the work of the next generation of scholars and students.
To Washington and New York City this week
Opportunities to meet with alums and also to gather with friends at the inaugural NYC club cocktail party. Here are the current details from Terese Molinaro in our Alumni Relations office:
- Inaugural Cocktail Party – Thursday, May 9
- Location: Penn Club of New York
- Registration Page: https://alumni.law.northwestern.edu/nyccocktailparty
- Registration has closed, but attendees are still welcome to join us. Please have anyone who would like to attend contact me or Michelle.
The Northeast corridor — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC — remains a fertile, vital place for Northwestern Law graduates. We have long recruited well from this part of the nation and we have sent eastward many hundreds of alumni to great positions in both the private and public sector.
We urge our NU Law grads to connect with other grads in these areas. The NYC and Washington clubs are especially useful venues to network and schmooze.
On the perils of “one size fits all” metrics
Yesterday, I posted on the employment measures issue and the Northwestern advantage. The focus was, naturally, on our law school; however, there is general point embedded in my comment which I would like to make more explicit: Efforts to rank schools on a narrow set of criteria have the unavoidable flaw of conflating a number of factors into a “one size fits all” rubric. Obvious point, to be sure, but one that bears notice when we hop on — even if briefly — into one or another ranking fad.
Consider the Above the Law rankings of law schools by employment, now enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame in the blogosophere. The measure here is a job for which a JD is required. I have already spoken about how this undervalues Northwestern. The difficulty which the rankings cuts deeper, however. There are surely law schools which produce students who have a range of choices in non-legal settings — not necessarily because that is the focus of a specific element of the program (as it is with the JD/MBA program at Northwestern and some other schools), but because the market in the area where many of the students congregate has a particularly robust employment situation there. For example, Loyola L.A. law school has a well-regarded sports & entertainment law focus. Surely there are positions in the sports & entertainment world in So Cal, some positions non-legal, available for grads of Loyola. On the other end of the country, NGO’s and other organizations in the nation’s capital might provide employment opportunities for so-called “non-elite” schools in Washington DC and the Northeast corrider.
Law students go to law school to practice law, the editors of ATL proclaim. Surely there is much to that slogan. But law students go to particular law schools for a myriad of reasons. The central choices about law school versus not-law school involve not only considerations of whether lucrative legal employment beacons, but about what is the tradeoff between pursuing a legal education for the purpose of advancing one’s employment goals in a broader sense and saving this money, creating credentials of different sorts, and entering the non-legal job market in earnest.
To be sure, many (perhaps even most) of these pursuits will be a second best, and maybe a distant one, to legal employment. And I make no pronouncements here at all about whether the investment is or is not worth it. That’s an important conversation, but a different one. Rather, the question here is whether efforts to craft a ranking that is centered on employment measures captures either the objectives of one or another law school on the one hand and the objectives of law students who will consider going to that law school on the other.
U.S. News rankings, for all their many, many flaws, looks at a wide variety of factors. And, with respect to employment, captures a larger set of criteria (although it would be more useful if Bob Morse were more transparent about the exact criteria). Efforts to shoehorn one key criterion — in the case of ATL, employment in legal jobs — conveys misinformation and foments, rather than alleviates, confusion.
Non-legal careers and the Northwestern advantage
When evaluating employment outcomes, much of the talk in the media and blogosphere has focused solely on positions that require a law degree and/or bar passage, implying that these are the only positions relevant to prospective law students or desirable for law school graduates. A recent ranking featured on Above the Law specifically disparaged non-legal jobs, saying that such non-legal jobs are, as the verse goes, “butchers, or bakers, or candle-stick makers.” Whatever merits such a description has for law schools whose graduates pursue non-legal careers not equivalent in any significant sense to purely jobs, this is not a fair or accurate way to measure Northwestern. Eliminating non-legal employment from the equation, as the ATL ranking, extensive commentary by the Law School Transparency Project, and observations elsewhere conspicuous in the media and blogosphere, is not appropriate in the case of Northwestern. Doing so fails to capture the uniqueness of our program and to account for our many graduates who, by choice, seek and obtain prestigious jobs in the business sector.
Take, for example, our renowned JD-MBA program.
Lawyers in the modern economy increasingly are called upon to work across international jurisdictions, to develop responsible practices within complex regulatory frameworks, and to lead multi-disciplinary teams. In 2001, Northwestern Law School, together with the Kellogg School of Management, created the nation’s first 3-year JD-MBA program as one way to meet this emerging need. With approximately 25 graduates each year, it is now the largest and most successful program of its kind. Its alumni number almost 500 and most now occupy leadership positions at law firms, businesses, and nonprofits. And many began their careers in business, not law.
When they graduate, half of our JD-MBA students pursue law-related jobs and half pursue jobs in business – most often in high-paying and highly-coveted jobs with prominent consulting firms, accounting firms, investment banks, venture capital firms, and other well-known corporations (sometimes referred to as “JD Advantage” positions). Those who decide on legal practice are sought by many of the nation’s leading law firms because of their expanded education and perspectives and their previous management experience. In some cases, our JD-MBA students ultimately decide between options and offers from employers in both sectors. Nearly every year, even during the downturn, 100% of the program’s graduates have secured permanent employment within 9 months of graduation.
The JD-MBA students who embark on business-related careers–where a JD might not be specifically required, but is nonetheless invaluable–comprise about 5% of our total graduates each year (6% in 2012). Further, because of our strong relationship with the Kellogg School of Management and the synergies that exist for all students, another 3%-4% of our overall JD students typically succeed in obtaining similar jobs immediately upon graduation. Therefore, any attempts by external sources to compare law schools solely on jobs that require a law degree fail to capture this sizeable and highly successful cohort of students.
Here are some examples: During the past three years, our JD-MBA graduates accepted positions at companies such as Altman Vilandrie & Company, AON, Bain & Company, Barclays Capital, Boston Consulting Group, Cerberus Capital Management, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Driehaus Capital Management, Glencore International, Goldman Sachs, Harvard Management Company, Intercontinental Hotels, Lazard Middle Market, L.E.K. Consulting, Marakon, McKinsey & Company, Metropolitan Bank, Monitor Group, Morgan Stanley, Pacific Alternative Asset Management Company (PAAMCO), PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Siemens Energy, Solar Capital, SumZero, Tishman Speyer, TomorrowVentures, Vitera Healthcare Solutions, William Blair, and UBS.
It is equally important to consider career trajectory – not just the first job – for history shows that great success lies ahead for most who obtain a Northwestern JD or JD-MBA. Focusing solely on our JD-MBA alumni, here is a sampling of what some of them are doing now.
- 49 law firm partners
- 55 law firm associates
- 37 Corporate Counsel (Assistant, Associate General Counsel, Corporate Counsel, Tax Counsel)
- 46 Presidents, CEOs, Chairmen, Owners, Founders
- 75 Vice Presidents, Managing Directors, Managing Partners, Principals, CFOs, COOs, CIOs, etc.
- 32 Unit/Department Directors or Executive Directors
- 5 Professors
- 1 Mayor
- 1 Judge
So is non-legal employment relevant at Northwestern Law? Absolutely. Our many students and alumni who have secured these kinds of jobs would agree. That’s the Northwestern advantage and that’s something to compare.
Ambassador Scheffer on international justice
Prof. David Scheffer, Director of Northwestern’s Center on International Human Rights, speaks here on the challenges of international justice:
A Q&A with US War Crimes Ambassador David Scheffer
By: Jennifer Gutman
David Scheffer, the first-ever war crimes ambassador for the US, will speak about “The Challenges of International Justice” on Monday, April 8, at Vassar College’s Sanders Classroom Building, Spitzer Auditorium. Currently serving as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Expert on United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials, Scheffer’s past work in the Balkans and Rwanda contributed to the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002. In anticipation of the talk, which will explore his recent war crimes work in Cambodia and his 2012 memoir All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals,Chronogram presents a Q&A with Scheffer on the topic of international justice.
Chronogram: What is the biggest challenge to international justice currently?
David Scheffer: The biggest challenge to international justice currently is political will, particularly the will of governments to enforce international arrest warrants against indicted fugitives roaming free on their territory and to provide the necessary financing to ensure the full operations of the international and hybrid war crimes tribunals. These are sometimes very tough decisions for governments to make because it can mean putting international justice goals ahead of national priorities, but if justice is the objective then political will is essential to meet it.
CM: There seems to be a problem with ending conflicts effectively and expeditiously and bringing justice afterwards. What can be done to improve this process?
DS: Ending conflicts is a highly complex diplomatic and often military endeavor. It is not the task of international justice literally to end conflicts and we should not burden war crimes tribunals with that responsibility. Achieving justice in the aftermath of conflict is a necessary goal in the modern era and that is why we have witnessed the creation of so many war crimes tribunals, some of them created in the middle of the conflicts and continuing long thereafter. The creation of the permanent International Criminal Court, which began to operate in 2002, was a major step to improving the process by ensuring the existence of a highly professional war crimes tribunal even at the beginning of conflicts so that all are on notice of their potential liability for commission of atrocity crimes. But again, it is folly to thrust the burden of ending conflicts or even deterring them on the backs of the tribunals. Their job is to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of atrocity crimes and bring them to justice, and that is an enormous challenge in and of itself.
CM: What has been learned through the war crimes trials in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Cambodia? What can be done better by the international community moving forward?
DS: This is a huge question that thousands of books and law review articles seek to address, so I won’t even try to begin here. All I can say is that the end of leadership impunity for atrocity crimes draws nearer thanks to the work of the war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia and the permanent International Criminal Court. We have learned that the cooperation of governments remains essential for the successful work of the tribunals, that sufficient funding must be available to cover the cost of international justice, that the public must exercise patience in waiting for the investigation, prosecution, and judgment phases of each defendant’s case because it does take much longer under international criminal law to achieve ultimate justice, and that the outreach of each tribunal with the public (including victims and perpetrators) is essential for the educational and healing process to begin. The international community needs to do better at funding the tribunals, supporting their investigative work and arrest strategies with full cooperation, and using diplomatic pressure to press reluctant governments to act in the interests of justice rather than their narrow national interests alone.
CM: Which aspect do you think has proven more important after conficts: peace and reconciliation commissions that offer immunity in return for full disclosure of past crimes, or trials of officials previously involved in atrocities?
DS: This is not necessarily a choice anymore. It was 20 years ago when the a peace and reconciliation commission approach was employed in South Africa. But during the last two decades the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court, with 121 states parties (including South Africa), and the long usage of other war crimes tribunals have changed the landscape. The international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes cannot be bargained way anymore; political, military, and even business leaders stand accountable for their actions under international law now, and nations have accepted that reality in their ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Nonetheless, there remains the opportunity to explore peace and reconciliation commissions for mid-level and low-level perpetrators of atrocity crimes, namely those individuals who would not be subject to investigation and prosecution anyway by the war crimes tribunals. Even there, though, nations are increasingly building into their criminal codes the enforcement of criminal law for the commission of atrocity crimes. It may remain the possibility that full disclosure of past crimes might enable mid-level and low-life perpetrators to avoid enforcement of such domestic criminal law, but that depends on the particular country at stake and its criminal code.
ABA Task Force on Legal Education Reform
The handwriting on the wall is revealed nicely in the first sentence of this article: 30 different law profs, 30 different answers about how best to reform legal education. The ideas range from narrow and specific to broad and radical.
What is interesting from a pure process perspective is that this task force is created under the aegis of the “big” ABA, not the Section on Legal Education. In other words, this group has a broad mandate from the larger association of American lawyers to delve into the current situation and to come forward with ideas and initiatives for consideration by the ABA. My prediction, and it is only that: If significant proposals emerge, they will gain traction at least in the public eye. And if the organization that has traditionally dealt with law school regulation — The Section, not the larger group — does not pursue these proposals in earnest, there will be serious tensions within the ABA.
All that said, the core matter is how best to gather input and evaluate ideas about our flawed system. There should be candid, strategic thinking from a variety of quarters. I welcome the good work and thinking of the Task Force (although I confess to a bit of anxiety about exactly what they will come up with!).
Clinicians meeting
San Juan, Puerto Rico, is the locale for the annual gathering, under the auspices of the Association of American Law Schools, of the clinical law teachers. Northwestern Law has a large contingent of participants in this conference, including our great director, Tom Geraghty.
This conference gives us an opportunity to showcase the remarkable work of our Bluhm Legal Clinic, a clinical program whose breadth and depth is as impressive as any clinical program in the nation.
With the help of our clinical faculty and key administrators, we have been hard at work in developing a compelling narrative of financial support for our clinic while also crafting a strategy for the future of the clinic. In these times of serious scrutiny of the shape of legal education, focused attention on how to best develop and nurture live-client skills training is a high priority. Our clinical programs provide valuable platforms for the improvement of lawyer training. We welcome input from our alumni and other friends about how best to accomplish our ambitious goals.
Northwestern entrepreneurs bring home the gold!
To: Northwestern Law Community
From: Thomas F. Geraghty, Associate Dean and Director, Bluhm Legal Clinic
Northwestern teams, coached by Esther Barron, Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic’s Entrepreneurship Law Center, stole the show at the 2013 Rice Business Plan Competition, which is self-described as the world’s richest and largest business plan competition. SiNode and BriteSeed won 1st and 2nd place and also each received several other awards and cash prizes. SiNode won $811,000 and BriteSeed won $238,000 in investments and awards. Two of BriteSeed’s four co-founders have ties to the Law School.
BriteSeed has developed a technology that detects blood vessels during surgeries which helps surgeons avoid making dangerous cuts. The BriteSeed team exemplifies Northwestern’s interdisciplinary approach to entrepreneurship education. Jonathan Gunn (class of ’13) studied patent and entrepreneurship law and also holds a doctorate in biomaterials and nanotechnology. Jonathan has published over 15 peer-reviewed articles and performed research in nanopartible-based imaging and wound-healing applications. Muneeb Bokhari (class of ’12) is an associate at Foley & Lardner. Before joining Northwestern Law, Muneeb worked in the technology industry for ten years, where he gained experience with several early stage startups as well as large multi-national firms. Fellow co-founder, Paul Fehrenbacher is a fourth-year medical student at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Before helping to establish BriteSeed, Paul served as Director of Pre-clinical Evaluation and Guidance at Wildcat Venture Management, a Chicago-based biotech company. Lastly, Mayank Vijayvergia is a masters student in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, where he has performed research in magnetic resonance elastography for non-invasive diagnoses of varying diseases. Esther Barron, Director of the Northwestern Entrepreneurship Law Center, proudly served as the team’s faculty advisor.
