By SHANNON O. WELLS
Historically, law schools often have had the luxury of existing in their own siloed worlds, removed somewhat from the churn of the larger university and its challenges within the higher education realm, allowing it to focus intently on practical matters like student bar-passage rates and employment prospects.
Sheila Martinez, the Jack and Lovell Olender professor of asylum refugee and immigration law at Pitt’s School of Law, feels that those days are largely over. The new dean of Pitt’s School of Law, therefore, should be acutely attuned to the big-picture academic landscape and the myriad challenges and opportunities it presents.
“There’s some people that still have a longing and nostalgia of the legal education of the past … but I don’t think this is where we should be going,” she said. “I think it’s difficult not to feed on that nostalgia, because I know our alumni has had wonderful experiences in the law school and they have a memory of the last thing that they experienced. But the landscape and the challenges of legal education are every day more intertwined with the challenges higher education has.
“So if I’m thinking about a dean for the future, I’m thinking of a person that is aware of the challenges in the future and has the will, the energy and the courage to tackle them.”
Martinez shared her thoughts during a virtual open forum on April 1, which provided an opportunity for the University community to share thoughts and feedback about the role and the type of person who could be successful as dean of Pitt’s law school.
Members of the community were invited to provide input for the search process, considering such factors as the school’s core activities that must be continued, opportunities and challenges for the next dean, how should the school look in three to five years, and what are measures of success and what will it take to get there.
The forum was led by search committee co-chairs Gene Anderson, dean of Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration, and Clarissa Slotterback, dean and professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Participants were asked to encourage others to share thoughts and feedback regarding the next dean through an online survey.
The search process comes in the wake of recent upheavals in the School of Law’s leadership. Professor Mary Crossley became interim dean of school in July 2023. She followed Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi, who stepped in after Amy Wildermuth stepped down as dean in January 2023, after almost five years in the position. In May 2023, the University of Cincinnati College of Law announced that Hamoudi had been named its 27th dean of the school.
In the past decade, the School of Law has seen a decline in students from 623 in 2013 to 508 in 2022-23, according to Pitt sources. The number has hovered around 500 since 2015.
Martinez, who serves as co-director of the Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice, said she thinks law schools “sometimes think that we are valuable just because we’re a law school.” In this “new world,” however, she said there “needs to be a little bit more worked on than just that, and I would like to see someone that is willing to engage that with interdisciplinarity.”
That includes improving the school’s profile through innovative projects and forward thinking more than “improving bar passage and employment,” as well as focusing on measuring outcomes. “And that those high outcomes are tied to student success.”
Stephanie Dangle, School of Law professor of practice and faculty director of the school’s externship program who also teaches courses in entertainment law and commercializing new technologies, said she would like to see a dean who champions more “interdisciplinary forces like that” be part of the law school curriculum.
She would also like to see the school take on greater engagement in the community. “We have great clinical programs, but also taking advantage of other ways to get our students engaged with the community, I think, is important.”
Noting the increasing appeal of juris doctor-oriented jobs, commonly known as “JD advantage, or preferred,” which require law degrees but not passing the bar exam, Dangle said the new law school dean should be someone who “realizes the importance of JD advantage careers. More and more, that’s going to be the directions our students are going to be forced to go into. But many go into it willingly.
“But having that as sort of an opportunity that’s emphasized from day one, and if possible, a dean who’s had that experience, I think would be great.”
Following up on Martinez’s comments, Judge Mike Fisher, distinguished jurist fellow in the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Third Circuit and a School of Law professor, said for a “premier public research university” like Pitt, with a “strong reputation” in medicine, science and applied technology, “from my view, there has not been much alignment, if any, between the law school and the direction that the rest of the University has been going.”
Fisher, who serves on Pitt’s Board of Trustees, noted the “very critical change” in learning applications through technology, including the recent explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) on campuses and in society. There’s no reason to believe that Pitt — by itself or through partnering with Carnegie Mellon University, “our neighbor right down the street who has no law school” — is not going to be a fertile ground for Pitt Law to “align itself with where the University is going and where CMU is going and to be able to contribute more in that direction.”
“What that may take is recruitment and investment in faculty,” he added. “Not only do we have outstanding people in the IP (internet protocol) areas, but (also) in those areas of artificial intelligence, or internet law and science. And I think if there’s maybe a shortcoming, it’s in those areas … Those are big changes.”
Noting a recurring theme in the dean-search discussion regarding commitment to research, Anjali Vats, School of Law associate professor, emphasized the importance of a leader with a strong, dynamic vision. “The idea of a dean that has a coherent plan for moving forward but a coherent plan that (also) addresses the sort of fundamentals: You can’t have a successful law school without strong bar-passage rates, but also takes into account the ways that legal education has changed and is changing. And that, I think, necessarily means working collaboratively with the institution writ large.”
In what she sees as “out-of-synchronous between the law schools’ vision for itself and what the University is imagining for itself,” Vats said maintaining a strong investment in teaching while moving the law school in a direction aligned with that of the University’s, means coming to terms with some of the existing structural constraints “without penalizing faculty for that.”
“So what does it mean to build a forward-thinking legal program that collaborates with a really collegial faculty and a really strong faculty in a way that can support the program that we have? Programming what we have in alignment with the larger University identity?” she said.
Responding to a Martinez’s question about “How sexy are we?” or the general appeal of Pitt and the School of Law in what appears to be a crowded search field for deans, Josh Ward, senior partner at Pittsburgh’s J.P. Ward & Associates, said, “I think timing is everything.”
And while the field of candidates changes year to year, “you do see some brilliant perennial candidates for sure. But there is a significant amount of turnover in candidates,” he said. “And so you can’t really control that, and you can’t control who your competition is in terms of other searches going on at the same time.”
Based on the timing of Pitt’s search, Ward said he’s not anticipating a “whole lot of competition” over the summer. “There are a couple of searches that we have concurrently going on that we’re representing that will end in the next few weeks, campus visits are concluding. So I suspect that there’ll be some serious advantages to being one of the only law dean searches having an active recruitment conversation over the summer.”
For this fall, that translates to what Ward called “very less crowded interview fields.” As other dean announcements start to go out, Pitt already will be at the first- or second-round interview process.
“I think there’s some serious advantages to that,” he said. “We have another search going on here, another institution that decided to spend four weeks in the market and try to finish this semester, and there’s risks associated with that, right? So I think this timeline that we’re on here could be strategically advantaged.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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