Paul Regis Dean Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Judith Areen is the Paul Regis Dean Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.  Between 1989 and 2004, she served as Executive Vice President for Law Affairs of the University and Dean of the Law Center.  As Dean of the Law Center, Professor Areen facilitated many important changes. Under her leadership, the Law Center tripled the size of financial aid endowment, added forty nine legal scholars to the full-time faculty, and reduced the size of the incoming JD class to foster more personalized instruction.  In 2003, Dean Areen was given the Equal Justice Works’ Outstanding Law School Dean Award for her effort to make public interest law an integral part of legal education at Georgetown. 

Professor Areen’s areas of academic expertise include family law, constitutional law, and law, medicine and ethics.  She is the author of a widely-used law school casebook (Family Law, 4th edition, Foundation Press 1999) and co-author of another (Law, Science and Medicine,, 2nd edition, Foundation Press, 1996).  She was chosen on the basis of her scholarship to be a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. during 1988-1989.

A graduate of Cornell University (1966) and the Yale Law School (1969) where she was a member of the Editorial Board of the Yale Law Journal, Professor Areen has worked in the private sector and in government at the local and federal levels.  Between 1977 and 1980 she served in the Office of Management and Budget as Director of the Federal Legal Representation Project which analyzed the work of the more than 14,000 lawyers in the Executive Branch and led to Executive Order 12146.  She then became General Counsel to President Carter’s Reorganization Project.  She served as Special Counsel to the White House Task Force on Regulatory Reform during the same period.  Professor Areen is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia, a member of the Council of the Section of Legal Education of the American Bar Association, a member of the American Law Institute, and a director of the Pro Bono Institute and Equal Justice Works.  She has served on the Board of Trustees of Cornell University and as a governor of the District of Columbia Bar, a consultant to the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences, and on the Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Defense on Women in the Services.  In 1991 and again in 1994 she was selected by the National Law Journal as one of the one hundred leading lawyers in the United States.