‘The Privilege of a Lifetime’: Dean William M. Treanor on 15 Years at Georgetown Law

Looking back to just over 15 years ago – what got you interested in the job at Georgetown Law?

I’d been at Fordham for 19 years – eight as dean – when Georgetown’s outgoing dean, Alex Aleinikoff, called me and suggested I apply. The idea appealed to me because it would continue my academic career in Jesuit law schools. The Jesuit mission really speaks to me. Jesuit schools are dedicated to educating the whole person, to educating people with a commitment to justice, to education that combines both theory and practice. Georgetown was also attractive to me because it was in Washington, D.C. – and New York is a great city, but it’s about entertainment and finance. Washington is about law and policy.

And you already knew Washington a bit.

This is actually my fifth stint in Washington. Right after college, I worked in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as a special assistant to the deputy commissioner, and then I went to the Department of Education when it was getting started, as a speechwriter for Secretary Shirley Hufstedler. I came back as a law firm summer associate when I was in law school. Later, I was an associate Independent Counsel in the Office of the Iran/Contra Special Counsel and a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney. And then at the end of the Clinton administration, I was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice.

Why did you decide to go to law school in the first place – and did you always think you were heading to academia?

My year at the Department of Education made me decide to go into legal education. First, because Secretary Hufstedler was a remarkable judge and public servant. If Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980, she would’ve been the first woman on the Supreme Court. All the people around her were lawyers, and I could see the benefit of getting a law degree. And then, also during that year, I had lunch with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who’s now an iconic figure at Harvard University and on public television, but he was early in his academic career then, and he’d been my senior thesis advisor when I was an undergraduate. We were discussing life choices, and I talked about the value that I thought that my work in the government provided. And he said, “You’re doing what one person could do, but when you’re an academic, you shape a generation, and there’s nothing more powerful or meaningful than that.”

As dean of Georgetown Law, you have the opportunity to meet a lot of VIPs in the worlds of law and politics and beyond. Who stands out as someone you would only have had the chance to know because of being here?

[Gesturing to a collection of photos from various campus events] That’s what these pictures are! But something that I was only able to get to do because I was dean of Georgetown Law was to interact with so many Supreme Court justices. And the one who always stands out is “RBG,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I think the first time I met her was after her husband, Marty [Professor Martin D. Ginsburg], who was on the faculty here, died and she came to empty out his office, which was incredibly moving. It was clear that they just loved each other so much. She was a very tiny, very small person. She was very low key, but also had a surprisingly good sense of humor. Going to Hart Auditorium with her multiple times, and seeing it packed with students, so many women in “Notorious RBG” T-shirts, and then walking on the stage and just seeing the crowd light up – those are moments that I will never forget. Really, that was magical.

One of the themes of your deanship has been expanding access to the education here: founding RISE and the admissions office’s early outreach program, increasing fundraising for scholarships. Why has that been a priority for you?

My father was a doctor, and his father had a fourth grade education and was a fireman. My dad was able to become a doctor because he received financial aid, and he was the product of a Jesuit medical school, Marquette. I was always very well aware as I was growing up that I had great opportunities because my father had received the kind of education that he’d received. And so that made me very aware of the importance of education, of opening doors. Also, this is really in the DNA of Georgetown. We started as an evening school because the people who deserved a great legal education were not just those from families of wealth, but the people of merit. So we’ve doubled the level of financial aid during my tenure through our Opportunity Scholarships, which are for people with high merit and high need. We started RISE, an orientation and networking program for incoming students with less exposure to the legal profession. And the early outreach program goes to high schools around the country and talks about law school to people who may not hear about law school around the dinner table, the way I did when I was growing up.

Georgetown Law has always attracted students interested in public interest careers – what are some of the ways you’ve helped support them?

In the government and nonprofit sectors, the hardest job to get is the first one. To help graduates enter the public interest field, I’ve worked with our career services offices, alumni, government agencies and nonprofits to develop a broad range of entry-level fellowships. I am very proud of the fact that, over the years, we have been able to offer these fellowships to more than 500 graduates. Different fellowship programs launch people on different career paths. For example, the DC Affordable Law Firm gives recent law graduates from Georgetown and elsewhere fifteen months of hands-on experience representing low-income clients while earning LL.M. degrees. The Capitol Hill Fellowship provides stipends that make it possible for graduates to get a foot in the door by starting their Congressional careers with otherwise unpaid internships. The Ruff Fellowships allow graduates to work in the DC Attorney General’s Office for a year. I don’t know of any school that comes close to providing so many fellowships. They have made it possible for many graduates to pursue the public interest career they desire.

A few years ago you and Professor Hillary Sale developed a course called “Lawyers as Leaders” – it was taught online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it became the most popular course in Georgetown Law history, with over 300 students enrolled. What did you identify as key leadership characteristics for lawyers, and how did you get those across?

I interviewed a range of faculty members about the journey that had led them to where they were today. And I have to say, I was struck by how candid and vulnerable people were about the struggles that they had. I hope it helped students see that everybody, including their professors, experiences challenges along the way. People’s life stories have twists and turns, and there are very few people who at the end of their career reflect and say, “I predicted it all when I was 25.” Some of the most important leadership skills that kept coming up were resilience, hard work and empathy. Intelligence doesn’t get you where you need to be if there’s no empathy or resilience, or if you lack a commitment to hard work.

What are some other ways you stay connected to current students?

One of the reasons I went into legal education is because lawyers play a major role in our society, and who they become is shaped in significant part by what they see in law school. When I was a first-year law student – not at Georgetown – I found it an incredibly cold place. That coldness communicates that law is a profession in which you’re not concerned for people. And so that concern has really been a focus of my time as dean, and as a professor before then. Every day when I arrive, I walk through the McDonough atrium and talk to students. And I often get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and talk to students. I take selfies with them to kind of establish a personal connection. More and more, when I walk around I get a very strong sense of how global the community is. Today, I met a table of students from Mexico planning a weekend to explore Virginia. It’s so much a part of who we are, and it’s incredibly profound.

I haven’t had as much classroom time as I would have liked. I’ve co-taught some upper-level seminars in constitutional law and business leadership, and I have taught the first year Legal Justice seminar in Section Three. I’m very much looking forward to being back in the classroom, because it’s just a joy for me. I love teaching first-year property. It’s so tangible. You can walk around a city and see the way in which the legal rules shape your physical world, and that’s fun.

Not all administrators love fundraising, but you seem to have a knack for it – raising money for scholarships, for faculty chairs, for campus improvements like the Tsai Hall coming soon – what are some of the secrets of your success?

When I first became dean at Fordham, I thought that the part of the job I would enjoy the least is the fundraising and development. And I have to say, it turns out that for me fundraising is enjoyable, because you’re talking to people who know that Georgetown Law opened doors for them and made their career possible. And like all Georgetown lawyers, they want to make a difference, and they can do so by supporting things that matter to them, whether it’s a new building or scholarships or an academic program or one of the centers or institutes. And we have a very strong development team and alumni relations team.

I always enjoy talking with alumni, in any context. Georgetown Law has really wonderful, community-oriented alumni. Earlier in my time here when we were doing some strategic planning, we brought alumni in to discuss what was valuable in legal education and what we should be focused on now. Their participation really shaped how the curriculum evolved. For example, our alumni urged us to create more hands-on learning opportunities. After receiving that input, we increased the number of experiential opportunities threefold, with new clinics and a broader range of practica and externships. Other people we talked to focused on opportunities to study in depth and to emerge from law school with something like an undergraduate major. This idea led to the Blume Public Interest Fellowships and our Business Law Scholars and Tech Scholars programs.

A big part of your legacy will be Tsai Hall, the new academic building, with construction planned to begin next summer. How will this new building reflect what you’ve learned and achieved during your deanship?

When McDonough was built, it was very much the “Paper Chase” era, with its classic large lecture halls. Tsai Hall reflects the way we teach now. It has smaller classrooms, most of them with flat floors, so the faculty member is more present with the students. It’s got great clinical space. We have the best clinical program in the country and probably the worst clinical space. We have room for students to hang out. In the wake of COVID, all of us realize the importance of face-to-face conversations and community. And architecturally, it’s designed to embrace Washington, D.C. with amazing views of the city.

Speaking of the neighborhood around us, it’s changed dramatically during your years here, with a lot of new commercial construction in the surrounding areas, and now some Georgetown departments moving from the Hilltop to what we now call the Capitol Campus. How have these changes benefited the Law Center?

It used to be that law firms and other businesses congregated along K Street. And I think what we’re seeing now is that the future is really in NOMA and Penn Quarter, and we’re really in the heart of that. And now that 395, to our west, is in a tunnel, there is a whole different feel, not having to cross a bridge over a highway late at night to get to the apartment buildings and restaurants on Massachusetts Avenue.

As for the Capitol Campus, one of the challenges that we’ve had is that legal education is becoming more interdisciplinary, but we are miles apart from the rest of the university. Many of our competitors have 30 percent of their students earning J.D./MBAs, but in some years we don’t have any because the Hilltop is so far away. Location really is everything. Many aligned disciplines will be down here – the McCourt School of Public Policy is here already, there will eventually be a school of the environment, there may be part of the business school, there are already some tech and health centers. And I think that’s great for the faculty as they do interdisciplinary research and it’s going to be great for the students in terms of being able to take classes in all of these different areas.

You’re taking a sabbatical year before returning to the classroom – and I hear you have a book project to keep you busy. What are you working on?

It’s about how two people with a very different conception of the Constitution than we’re familiar with, James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, won the battle over what the Constitution’s text is. They were the most important figures at the Constitutional Convention. The book will then talk about how James Madison won the battle over what that text means in the 50 years that followed.

Morris and Wilson had visions of the Constitution that were similar to the one that Alexander Hamilton, who was a minor figure at the convention, would later champion. They were Hamiltonians before Hamilton. They fought for – and at the convention largely achieved – a powerful national government. They also envisioned states with limited power. They won at the convention, and Morris would accompany George Washington as he left Philadelphia, with cheering crowds lining the streets. In contrast, Madison, who has come to be thought of as the father of the Constitution, left the convention distraught, because he had lost on central parts of his constitutional vision.

That’s the first part of the book. And then the second part is how Madison, having lost the battle at the convention, won the battle over what the text means and why we have forgotten Wilson and Morris. Courts and scholars today rely on Madison’s notes of the convention. They are treated almost as accurate transcripts. But there is good evidence, uncovered by Professor Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School, that Madison altered his notes in critical ways, largely to bring his statements at the convention closer to Jefferson’s thinking. And so the account of the convention that we have come to rely on has fundamental flaws.

These are all great stories. Madison went bankrupt. He and his wife only had one asset, which was his notes. He never acknowledged that he had altered them. He didn’t publish them in his lifetime, and he didn’t want to destroy them, because that was all they had. So he left it to his wife to decide whether to publish them or not. And she did – it was what she needed to survive.

And then Morris was very colorful, he was very funny. He’s the most anti-slavery delegate at the convention. And he’s really the most graceful writer. But also, he was a serial philanderer, and he had a peg leg and he encouraged the story that it was because he was evading a jealous husband and jumped out of a second-story window. Then he married a woman who was plausibly accused of two murders.

And James Wilson, who was a Supreme Court justice, married a teenager and went bankrupt, and while he was on the Court fled his creditors so he wouldn’t be thrown in the debtor’s prison. One caught him in North Carolina, and he was placed in a kind of house arrest in a tavern, where he died in disgrace.

So, these are not Pantheon stories.

You’re looking at these stories of the Founding Fathers through two lenses, as a lawyer and a historian. What difference do you think it makes to have both those perspectives?

It’s very striking to me that people now think of originalism as a conservative approach to jurisprudence. When I was in law school, the leading originalists, or textualists, were actually people who were on the left. The champion of originalism on the Supreme Court was Hugo Black, who was an FDR appointee and a leader of the liberal wing of the Court.

While we’ve come to think of originalism as inherently conservative, it’s not. But it’s not always liberal either. I mean, if you’re going to take it seriously, it’s not always going to align with what you want. It is what it is. And all these different personalities played roles and had very different approaches and goals. So it’s not like there was one template that everybody followed.

Do you have any advice for your successor?

This is an extraordinary place. It’s the privilege of a lifetime to be dean. Think about what our mission is and what you can do to advance it. I would also emphasize the importance of treating everybody with respect: treating students with respect, treating staff with respect, treating faculty with respect. I think that’s really in our DNA and I hope that continues. First of all, that’s just the right thing to do, but also when you treat people with respect, students see that as their model of what it means to be a professional. And that conveys very powerfully what it means to be a Georgetown lawyer.