Symposium: Leadership In Legal Education

Issue II – 2001*

William M. Richman 

Symposium Coordinator

As the title indicates, the focus of this symposium issue of the University of Toledo Law Review is leadership in legal education – less abstractly - the leadership of law schools. The goal of this second annual symposium issue, is to provide an opportunity for law school deans to share their ideas, plans, initiatives, successes, and failures for the edification of other current deans and those who will follow.

Obviously, deans do not have a corner on the market on leadership. Certainly there is role here for faculty, junior as well senior, with respect to many issues. Faculty members can assist each other in teaching and scholarship and show the way by example in matters of curriculum and public service; and institutional and planning initiatives often begin, at least, with the faculty.

Realistically, however, leadership is primarily the province of the Dean, and this is so for many reasons. Individual faculty members rarely have the ear of university administrators or major donors, and often they are necessary for meaningful change. Similarly individual faculty members or even groups can seldom manage to produce complete consensus on an issue, and what might have been an initiative can become simply a faction fight. Further, the devil is in the details, and execution of any serious project nearly always involves administrative details beyond the resources and patience of individual faculty or even groups.

Thus, the task of leadership falls to the Dean. And, to listen to many deans, the job is a lonely one; after all, the dean is in equal parts a middle manager for the university, a negotiator and advocate for the law school and the faculty, and a supervisor. This combination of roles means inevitably that the Dean, who as a faculty member, could rely heavily on the advice of colleagues, must now have few confidants and make many decisions alone. The tension and isolation inherent in the job are, no doubt, responsible in part for the short tenure of many deans.

There are many resources to which deans can turn for help and advice. Mentors, colleagues, and other deans are obvious places to turn. There is an ABA manual for deans, and there is no lack of meetings and speakers sponsored by the ABA, the AALS, and the ALI. There is, however, no routinely available published forum for deans to exchange ideas on the administration and leadership of law schools. There is the Journal of Legal Education, but its mission is considerably broader than law school leadership, and its articles are longer and more heavily researched than many deans have the luxury of time to produce.

Because deans often have little time for serious research, the emphasis in this forum is on short articles. No one need acquit her scholarship or, more realistically, exhaust his research assistants. Footnoting is minimal or absent at the discretion of the author. Prose polishing, except for those who just cannot help it, may be wasted effort. Rather our goal is to collect pieces of practical wisdom that may be immediately useful to other deans or dean candidates. Nor need every contribution recount a success; as the scientists have long realized, unforeseen consequences and less than optimal results have as much to teach as glowing success stories.

The Symposium is organized alphabetically by the author's name. Another possibility was to organize the essays by theme, but they are too rich and varied for easy categorization. Although some of the essays concern the particular role of the dean at a religiously affiliated law school, they are not separated by theme. Ultimately we decided to allow the reader to wander through the Symposium and impose upon the essays whatever organizing scheme seems most useful.

* The essays currently posted on the website constitute about three quarters of the total that will be published in the printed volume. More will be added to the site as we progress through the editing process.