On July 24, Stanford University announced that I would be the 13th dean of Stanford Law School. I am both thrilled and humbled by the opportunity to take the helm at this extraordinary institution. Let me share with you some of what I have experienced since late July, and some of my initial impressions from the short time that I have been here.

The first thing that became apparent to me was the depth and warmth of the Stanford community—or, as I have come to think of it, community with a capital C. In the days and weeks following the announcement, hundreds of people affiliated with Stanford called, wrote, emailed, texted, or posted on my Facebook page. I heard from what seemed to be every-one connected to SLS—faculty, administrators, staff, students, and many, many law school 
alums. But I also heard from dozens of people who are not affiliated directly with Stanford Law School, but rather with the greater university—from professors, to human resources personnel, to department chairs. I heard from people hiking in the mountains, floating down rivers on rafting trips, and traveling abroad. Without exception, they congratulated me, they offered help, and they assured me that I would love my time at Stanford.

We planned originally to use this issue of the Stanford Lawyer to recognize and celebrate the results of “The Stanford Challenge,” the university’s recently concluded, five-year fundraising effort. The overall goals of the campaign, you may recall, were to promote research engaged directly with some of society’s most pressing problems—preserving [...]

It takes a thick skin to be a legal educator these days, as anyone who reads newspapers or law blogs can attest. Law schools seem to have become everyone’s favorite whipping boy. I briefly questioned claims about the supposedly declining value of a JD in my recent state-of-the-school letter. A still more persistent criticism, however, has been that we’re not properly preparing students for practice, and I’d like to respond to that complaint as well. Many critics seem bothered by the fact that faculty do scholarship, as if that’s a waste of time and money. It’s a disturbing (not to mention misplaced) critique but only indirectly related to whether law schools provide an adequate education. It needs a reply, which I will offer in the next issue’s letter. Right now, I want to focus on professional education.

The most striking thing about the criticisms is that, so far as I can tell, the complaints come mostly from people who have little idea what law schools today actually do: people who assume that we still look like we did 20 or 30 years ago (when they were law students). We don’t. On the contrary, the professional education law students get today is far superior to the one I got in the early 1980s, which really did look like what the commentators are criticizing: three years of large Socratic classes with only an occasional academic seminar for relief. But law schools have been growing beyond that for years.

It is true that tenured and tenure-track faculty still teach a broad array of doctrinal classes in the traditional way. We do so because it remains as efficient and effective a method as anyone has found to teach the overarching theoretical structure of a field. Faculty also teach courses and seminars of a more academic nature, on everything from legal history to interpretive theory to the relationship of law to disciplines like economics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology.

This issue of Stanford Lawyer looks at criminal law. It’s an area of real strength at SLS. We have top scholars in the field, and offer a wide selection of courses. The Stanford Criminal Justice Center, co-directed by Bob Weisberg and Joan Petersilia, does cutting-edge research on criminal and penal policy. And two clinics—one focusing on defense, the other on prosecution—give students an opportunity to take what they learn in classes and from research and apply it in real-world settings. Students interested in criminal law and justice can thus experience the full range of learning situations needed to launch a successful career: classes, research, and experiential learning. It’s a model of legal education we are implementing across the curriculum—from business law to intellectual property law to environmental law, international law, and more—replacing the unguided, haphazard curriculum of the past with opportunities for structured immersion in the array of experiences needed to train great lawyers.

This idea of a guided and structured curriculum is no small matter. Advice on what to do while in law school has long been scarce—not just at Stanford but everywhere. Most of us were told that it didn’t matter much what courses we took, that we should just look on our time in law school as an opportunity to do a sort of “liberal arts in law” degree.

As I sit here typing, the din of nearby construction continues unabated outside my window. At times, the noise makes working difficult, but I’m happy to endure it because the Neukom Building—our new academic building that will be named for William H. Neukom ’67, whose generosity (along with that of many others) made it possible—is so important to the law school’s future. It’s important, first, to address a critical space shortage for faculty and staff, and, second, to give our growing clinic much needed room to thrive. But the Neukom Building offers yet a third benefit inasmuch as the space it adds will enable us to repurpose our current facilities in ways that meaningfully enhance the research opportunities available to students and faculty.