Fifteen Years of Change: Faculty

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When Michael Gottesman joined the faculty in 1989, the high profile lawyer traded his gracious office at Bredhoff & Kaiser, one of the most respected labor law firms in the United States, for a room with no view at the Law Center. “To indulge in understatement, space was at a premium,” he says. “We were confined to a single building. I had a windowless office, and many who were considerably senior to me had inhabited windowless offices for years. The library filled the third and fourth floors of McDonough, and the cafeteria was about half its current size – and not nearly so attractive and tasty as it is today.”

The space crunch had a ripple effect on the student body. “There was so little room that students had no place to study or engage in leisure activities, so most of them showed up at the start of a class and left as soon as it was over,” Gottesman remembers. “That didn’t mean returning to Gewirz – there was no Gewirz. We didn’t have the park-like space that now separates McDonough from the library. The inevitable result was that students felt little emotional attachment to the Law Center.” Professor Milton Regan – a Law Center alumnus (L’85) and former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan – also arrived in 1989. “The entire school was located in one building [McDonough Hall],” he recalls. “This made for a fairly intense physical experience.” But if the quarters were close, so were the relationships between colleagues. Says Regan, “From the moment I returned as a professor, I’ve felt that I’ve resumed an ongoing conversation.”

"I WAS COMING UP THE FRONT STEPS ON THE FIRST DAY AND I SAW THE BANNER SAYING, ‘LAW IS THE MEANS, JUSTICE IS THE END.’ SEEING THAT AS WHAT THE SCHOOL STOOD FOR WAS REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME. THE SCHOOL REALLY EMBRACES THAT PHILOSOPHY. IT’S A WAY OF BEING.”
— JAMES FORMAN JR.

A decade and a half later, the Law Center has recruited more than 40 additional scholars. The 100 women and men at Georgetown now constitute the largest full-time law faculty in the country. But as the faculty has grown, the bonhomie has not diminished. In 2003, when William Bratton, a major scholar in the field of corporate law and author of the leading casebook on corporate finance, joined the faculty, he found “an optimism here and a level of support for the institution amongst the faculty that’s exceptional. Georgetown has supported me unstintingly,” he says, “but I’m nothing special as far as that’s concerned.”
    James Forman Jr. arrived the same year. After clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and spending six years in the public defender service of the District of Columbia, Forman had been offered teaching positions at Yale, NYU, and the University of Michigan, but turned them down for a professorship at Georgetown. His reasoning? “When you compare the teaching load, support, and salary, Georgetown is playing right along with the elite schools,” he says. “The top-tier schools were indistinguishable.”
   Forman knew he’d made the right choice when “I was coming up the front steps on the first day and I saw the banner saying, ‘Law is the means, justice is the end.’ Seeing that as what the school stood for was really important to me,” he says. “The school really embraces that philosophy. It’s a way of being, not a motto. That makes me proud.” He’s discovered another plus: “I’m teaching the smartest, most engaged, most active, most creative, most fun group of students that I could ever imagine.”
   Kathy Zeiler, a 2003 faculty hire with a Ph.D. in economics from California Tech as well as a law degree, saw Georgetown as a place that would support her research and teaching interests in the fields of economics and healthcare law. And she knew she’d be in good company. “Georgetown is the home to some of the most well-known scholars in these fields. I have found some of my most useful mentors among them,” she says.

“ WE FOUND WAYS TO CELEBRATE MORE PUBLICLY THE SCHOLARLY WORK OF THE FACULTY.”
— WENDY WILLIAMS

“The research support is generous and the numerous workshops create a rich environment of intellectual exchange.” Faculty scholarship is one of the Law Center’s top priorities. When the 1989-1994 Long Range Plan recommended creating the position of Associate Dean for Research, the suggestion was put in place almost immediately. Appointed in 1989, Wendy Williams remembers the challenges: “The big question in the beginning was, ‘How do we create a culture that values the pursuit of scholarship? What can we do structurally and financially to encourage and support the faculty? How do we guide and inspire young and new faculty to take the scholarly plunge?’ Our answer was, in part, to bring a rich array of scholars, legal and non-legal, into the law school to discuss their work.
“Even more important,” says Williams, “we focused on changes within the law school. We established a research workshop in which faculty members would present their own work-in-progress on a regular basis and additional supports including research leaves between sabbaticals, reduced loads to facilitate completion of major scholarly projects, summer writers’ grants, and more generous travel allowances. We found ways to celebrate more publicly the scholarly work of the faculty. Judy Areen also made scholarship a prime factor in faculty salary decisions.” Current Associate Dean for Research T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who took over the post in 2003, has continued the emphasis on scholarly efforts. The goal “is to build a vibrant, intellectual community,” he says. “You do that by having lots of papers discussed and lots of conversations started and an enormous number of presentations.”
The papers are presented at a number of workshops that give faculty members the opportunity to discuss their work with colleagues and to hear from scholars at other law schools. In addition to the weekly Faculty Research Workshop, other opportunities for give-and-take include the Sloan Interdisciplinary Workshop on Business Institutions and worshops in constitutional, environmental, and tax law.

Under Aleinikoff, untenured faculty members are now being given their own forum, meeting once a month to talk about ways to develop their scholarship.
     The 2003 Educational Quality Ratings confirmed the school’s success in its myriad scholarly endeavors. Prepared by Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Texas School of Law, the ratings evaluate scholarly impact based on citations to faculty by other scholars. Georgetown is rated eighth in the nation.
     While scholarship thrives at the Law Center, there is also a premium placed on good teaching. As part of a dedicated effort to help professors excel in the classroom, a program of “Faculty Angels” pairs every new or visiting faculty member with an established colleague to act as what Professor Jeff Bauman calls “that person’s guardian angel.” It’s the angel’s job to help their charge learn things small and great – “from where to find paper clips to how to encourage student participation in class,” Bauman says.
     The school also started a Teaching Committee in 1991, chaired for many years by Bauman. One of their early initiatives was to bring in an independent teaching consultant, Catherine Krupnick, then of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Now, Krupnick holds workshops, mentors adjuncts, and regularly advises new faculty members.
     The annual Frank F. Flegal Teaching Award for outstanding contributions by full-time faculty to teaching was instituted in 1995 to recognize teaching excellence in its many forms. The first year, it was awarded to Steven Goldberg and Girardeau Spann, each widely acknowledged as a superb classroom teacher. The 2003 award was given to Samuel Dash and Lisa Heinzerling.
     The institutional supports help create what Professor William Bratton describes as “an extraordinary faculty culture. Colleagues here are more supportive of one another than at any of the many institutions at which I have been associated.”

“WHAT WAS VERY GOOD
IN 1989 HAS BECOME
EXCELLENT IN 2004.”
—MICHAEL GOTTESMAN

     Judge Mary Lupo elaborates: “People leave Stanford and Yale and come to Georgetown because they love the working environment. The faculty is focused on the students and on the quality of the education and not on envy, backbiting, or who got on CNN. It’s not dog-eat-dog. It’s got a spirit of cooperation, respect, and academic freedom.”
     Associate Dean of Clinical Education and Public Service Wallace Mlyniec notes, “There’s a genuine affection for one another and a genuine commitment to shared goals.” Another asset is that the Law Center has critical mass in each area of scholarship that, he says, “fuels creativity.”
     It also fuels discussion. Professor Viet Dinh has said: “We share the same interests even if we differ in our perspectives. It is a tribute to the intellect, honesty, integrity, and, ultimately, to the camaraderie of the community.”
     After 15 years at the Law Center, Professor Michael Gottesman agrees. “I was proud to join the Georgetown ranks full-time in 1989, but I’m even prouder to say I’m on the Georgetown faculty today,” he says. “What was very good in 1989 has become excellent in 2004.”

Adjunct Faculty The Law Center has attracted top practitioners to teach on

its adjunct faculty, judiciously drawing from a rich pool of practicing lawyers, government officials, international civil servants, and judges – many of whom are alumni – to help fill out the curriculum in the 26 areas in which the Law Center has courses.They add their experience and knowledge of cutting-edge issues.The Law Center honors an outstanding member of the adjunct faculty in the J.D. program each year by awarding the annual Charles Fahy Distinguished Adjunct Professor Award.The award recognizes the faculty member who has provided exceptional service to Georgetown in teaching, curriculum development, student counseling, and involvement in extracurricular Law Center activities.The first award, in 1989, was given to Kenneth R. Feinberg, Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the Agent Orange Settlement, who is one of the country’s leading experts in alternative dispute resolution.The most recent award went to the Honorable Laurence H. Silberman, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit who, before ascending to the bench, was an attorney specializing in administrative law. He was named by President George W. Bush as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

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Revised June 1, 2004 (SPR)