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December 2007
Dear Friends,
A lingering summer and late fall left leaves on the trees around the law campus until after Thanksgiving. Some of our environmentally minded students wonder whether these are the early signs of the dramatic change in climate that scientists are now, nearly uniformly, predicting. "Sustainability" has become the word of the day, and with good reason. It challenges the Law Center to be concerned about its own carbon footprint while at the same time pressing national and world leaders on issues of environmental, security, and health policy. Green begins at home, both in our programs and our processes.
We address these issues — and other issues of global importance — in our classrooms, the scholarship of the faculty, and our centers and institutes. The Law Center continues to combine theory and practice in ways that redound to the benefit of both. So this year we have launched a program in Law and Philosophy (four members of the law faculty have Ph.D.s in philosophy) and a Center on National Security and the Law. Professor Judith Lichtenberg, a member of the Georgetown Philosophy Department, is directing the Law and Philosophy Program, which will sponsor courses and conferences and bring distinguished visitors to the campus. Professor Neal Katyal is director of the national security center. The Center is already playing a major role in convening policy makers and academics to discuss issues of surveillance, secrecy, torture, and civil and human rights.
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This year we have welcomed seven new members to our full-time faculty.
Jane Aiken, one of the nation's leaders in clinical education, joins us from the Washington University School of Law. Jane will play a major role in our expansion of experiential learning offerings, as we seek to develop new models for courses and related opportunities through which students can gain real-life lawyering experience connected to their academic work. Her new course, "Mothering and Criminality," will explore the social construction of "bad" mothering — both in the classroom and by working with incarcerated mothers and grassroots policy-making organizations.
Adam Levitin specializes in bankruptcy and commercial law. His research focuses on financial institutions and their role in the consumer and business credit economy. Adam previously worked at Weil, Gotshal & Manges; Cravath, Swaine and Moore; and the Securities and Exchange Commission in Boston.
Jonathan Molot comes to us from George Washington University Law School. Jon writes and teaches in the fields of civil procedure, complex litigation, administrative law, federal courts, and insurance law. His current research explores ways in which lawyers can move beyond managing litigation risk for clients to actually relieving their clients of risk.
Álvaro Santos, just entering the professoriate, will teach courses in international trade, law and economic development, and transnational labor law. His doctoral dissertation from Harvard on the effects of globalization on domestic labor regimes examines the case of North American economic integration and its impact on Mexico's labor institutions.
Three professors joined our Legal Research and Writing Program.
Sonya Bonneau comes to us from the Syracuse University College of Law, where she was a legal writing professor. Prior to her time in the academy, she was a partner in the litigation department of Hancock and Estabrook, working on commercial, employment discrimination, and antitrust matters.
Michael Golden returns to the Law Center after a stint in the litigation department of Latham and Watkins. While at Latham, he successfully argued a religious freedom case on behalf of federal prisoners challenging government policy that had prevented full participation in the sacrament of communion. His scholarly interests focus on constitutional law and intellectual property.
Rima Sirota served in the Professional Responsibility Advisory Office of the U.S. Department of Justice before coming to the Law Center. She also currently serves as an appointed hearing committee member of the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility.
The arrival of Professors Bonneau, Golden, and Sirota completes the expansion and transformation of our Legal Research and Writing Program. Now every first-year student will be taught research and writing by a professor in a small group setting.
This year a number of faculty have received important recognition.
Phil Schrag will be presented with the Association of American Law Schools' Deborah L. Rhode Award in January 2008, given annually to a law professor who has made a contribution to increasing pro bono and public service opportunities in law schools. The award recognizes Phil's tireless — and successful — work in seeking federal loan forgiveness legislation for law graduates who take public interest and government employment. His nearly seven years of effort culminated in enactment of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act in September.
In October, Bill Bratton was installed as the first Peter P. Weidenbruch, Jr., Professor of Business Law. The professorship, honoring Peter's more than four decades of teaching and service to the Law Center, was made possible by a generous gift from David R. Belding (L'71).
David Cole's new book, Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror (co-authored with Jules Lobel), received the first Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. David also received the Freedom of Expression Award from the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.
Neal Katyal was recognized for his role in the landmark Supreme Court case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. He and his co-counsel, Navy Lt. Comdr. Charles Swift (who received an honorary degree at the Law Center's commencement in May), received the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU of Massachusetts Foundation and the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice.
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We continue to recruit extremely talented students to Georgetown Law. The Class of 2010, which entered this fall, has a median LSAT score of 170 (98th percentile), setting a new standard for Georgetown.
Perhaps more importantly, our students continue to enrich the community with new programs and projects. These have included:
- Creation of SPICE—Students for Public Interest Community Enhancement — whose mission is to enhance opportunities for students to participate in pro bono and other public interest projects both in and beyond law school and to encourage students to pursue careers in the public interest.
- A student-led seminar and fact-finding mission to Guatemala that focused on the transnational effects of U.S. anti-gang initiatives on immigration from Central America.
- Establishment of the Georgetown Law chapter of Active Minds, the national student organization dedicated to educating university communities about student mental health and wellness. The Law Center is the first graduate school in the nation to have an Active Minds chapter.
- The Progressive Alliance for Life sponsored a program this October called "Dead Man Walking, the Journey Continued," with Sister Helen Prejean.
- The Federalist Society sponsored a talk this fall on "Iraqi Legal Culture and Traditions" with Aswad Al-Minshidi, President of the Bar and Lawyer's Union of Iraq, and Wrea Dzaye, Vice President of the Bar and Lawyer's Union of the Kurdistan Region.
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Our campus increasingly attracts legal scholars and policy makers from Washington, the nation and the world. This fall, Secretaries Chertoff, Leavitt, and Paulson and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (L'66) addressed audiences at the Law Center. Justices Breyer and O'Connor spoke at a conference on the election and selection of state judges, which Justice Souter also attended.
We heard talks by Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the WTO, and Thomas Buergenthal, a judge on the International Court of Justice, who was our inaugural Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Visiting Professor in Human Rights. Baroness Brenda Hale, the first woman to join the Law Lords in the House of Lords (essentially the British Supreme Court), gave the Ryan Lecture in September; she spoke on "Human Rights in the Age of Terrorism." Our Henry Kaiser Memorial Lecturer was Lord Neil Kinnock. He argued in his talk on "Globalization, Labor Conditions, and Human Rights" that "[t]he case for securing change that can make globalised economic activity and integration a dependable source of plenty, of equitable distribution, of rising standards of living and liberty is based on the need for security as well as the utility of efficiency and the cause of justice."
Members of the faculty organized conferences on the Convention of the Rights of the Child, immigration and human rights, contract law theory, global warming and the SEC, and global antitrust enforcement. Our CLE program’s Fourth Annual Advanced E-Discovery Institute on the Revised Federal Rules drew a standing-room-only crowd.
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I note with great sadness the death of Robert Oakley in September. Bob served for 25 years as director of our law library and was a nationally recognized leader among law librarians. Under his stewardship, the library grew from its modest and cramped quarters in the McDonough Building to one of the great collections in the world in the Williams and Wolff Libraries.
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I write as I am about to depart for a trip to China to meet with law faculties in Shanghai and Beijing and to be present at the opening of a Georgetown office in Shanghai in association with Fudan University. We will also meet with alumni in the region to establish an Asia Alumni Board. The Board will be organized in a manner similar to our European Law Alumni Advisory Board, which held its second meeting this fall at the Law Center.
On the way to China, I will stop in Palo Alto with Deborah Epstein, Associate Dean for Clinics and Public Interest, and Professor Aiken to participate in an important new project co-sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Stanford Law School. Following a major report published by the Foundation last year entitled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, the three-year project will examine curricula and pedagogy in three categories identified by the Carnegie study — legal analysis, lawyering skills, and professional identity. Georgetown is one of ten law schools invited to participate.
Thank you for your good will and support, which allow Georgetown Law to excel and to contribute to our local community and to the nation. I wish you a wonderful holiday season filled with family, good cheer and, depending on your taste, a good book or some college football. And watch for the Hoya basketball team, heading — we hope — for another appearance in the Final Four.
Alex Aleinikoff
Dean
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