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16 Syllabus 1 (1985)

handle is hein.journals/syllabus16 and id is 1 raw text is: American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar
Volume XVI8 Number_1                                                                                                Marh,__985

Some Law Sho
(Women) Leaders
'Token Woman'         Professor Worries
Administrator Finds   About 'Death
job Exhausting        After Tenure'

Women In Law Firms
SVomen Members
   Women Partners
--        Total Partners

0-50) lawyers  50-t)       os'er 100

By Betsy Levin
Dean, University of Colorado
School of Law
ccording to Jean Love, of the
University of California at Davis,
there were seven women deans in
1974, exactly the same number as in
1984 This doesn't suggest much
progress. However, in 1981, when I
was appointed, there were no other
women deans, Dorothy Nelson, Soia
Mentschikoff, and Judith McKelvey
having stepped down shortly before.
Thus one could argue that getting
back to where we were in 1974 is
progress of a sort.
Needless to say, like so many of
us, I did not plan to become a dean
or even a law professor. One
unplanned event led to another and I
found myself, in turn, a law
professor at Duke, general counsel to
the U.S. Department of Education
and, finally (after I was fired by
President Reagan), dean at the
University of Colorado Law School
The job has been a frustrating and
exhausting one, requiring an average
of 80-85 hours a week, largely
because of a lack of resources and
insufficient staff at the University of
Colorado. But those burdens are
further increased when, as the token
woman administrator, I am asked to
serve on an extensive number of
committees and to address many
different groups, not only at the
University but also within the state
and around the country.
Continued on page 7

By Sylvia A. Law
New York University Law Professor
and MacArthur Fellow
or a woman, or indeed for a
man, to gain tenure at an American
law school today, demands devotion
of a substantial portion of our lives
to meeting other people's
expectations. Students expect us to
be simultaneously authoritative and
entertaining. Colleagues expect us to
produce scholarship, meeting
standards of excellence that are both
rigid and elusive.
After decades of meeting the
expectations of others, it is very
difficult to know what we want, who
we are, and what we think.
In addition, most of us are
exhausted by the struggle to prove
ourselves as good as our
predecessors, and to do so without
the help of a wife to care for
children, home, and emotional and
social life.
Women who achieve tenure need
and deserve some R & R. We need
to sit on the beach. We need to
cultivate tomatoes and relationships
with people we respect and enjoy.
Friends help us know who we are
and what we believe. After years of
conforming in a male-dominated
hierachy, we need warmth,
spontaneity, and schmoozing.
But R & R is not enough. One of
the most depressing aspects of
academic life is the number of older
colleagues who are socially and
Continued on page 3

Women In Law Schools

Syllabus Graphic; Sources: National
Association of Law Placement for
Women in Law Firms, ABA Consultant
on Legal Education for Women in Law
Schools. (See pages 2, 3, 5 and 6 for
other articles on women and the law.)

Mission Statements:
A Possible Response to Declining Enrollments
and Way of Tolerating Different Views

By Stephen B. Young
Dean, Hamline University School
of Law
A law school mission statement is
not systematic philosophy but rather
a road map highlighting parts of the
terrain. The exclusion of certain
possibilities permits a focus on what
seems most important.
In a period of declining student
enrollments when resources will be
less plentiful than they were during
the last two decades, mission
statements indicate financial priorities
as legal education retrenches. If a law
school has a special focus, it can
attract students who care about that
particular emphasis.
The need to fashion its own
mission statement will confront each
school's faculty with the hard fact
that it cannot be a replica of the
Harvard Law School of 50 or so
years ago. The fond illusion that
legal education is nothing more than
clotting a single faculty's sense of
self-worth has outlived not only its
usefulness but also its moral appeal.
Each school needs to fashion a
unique set of special programs while
adhering to the highest standards of
rigor and excellence in legal analysis.
Agricultural law programs can
provide a different emphasis for law
schools in the midwest while
maritime law programs are more
appropriate to law schools in great
trading entrepots. Some schools may
emphasize skills training while
others press jurisprudence and
interdisciplinary studies of the legal
order. Our society is sufficiently

complex to absorb graduates with
different orientations to their
legal training.
Mission statements are essential for
law schools today, not so much for
the words ultimately chosen but,
rather, for the drafting process.
How can a faculty draft a mission
statement without either tearing itself
apart in factional disagreement or
else finding agreement on a level of
abstraction so vague and innocuous
as to be meaningless?
The central catalytic force in
finding common agreement must
come from the dean, who must help
the faculty winnow out those
propositions which no one feels are
important. The process should then
focus on those premises, frequently
unstated, which a large majority of
the faculty accepts as part of their
image of why law professors are
important to society.
Attention then can turn to more
particular aspects of law teaching.
The faculty can set relevant
standards and consider possibilities
which could set the school apart.
An attempt to depict every aspect
of the school is unwisely ambitious.
Agreement cannot be reached on
such details and should not be
Continued on page 8

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