I am delighted and honored to be writing to you as dean of the Law School. As I’ve learned over 25 years within this community—as a student, alumnus, and professor—NYU Law is a unique place that is kinetic, spirited, and committed to excellence.
After nine years of stellar leadership under my predecessor, Dean Trevor Morrison, those attributes of the Law School are even truer today. We are in a splendid position to move forward in a changing world.
But at NYU Law, we don’t just head into the future, we reach for it. Innovation is part of our DNA. Our graduates do remarkable and important work throughout the world, and their support strengthens the Law School on all fronts. Our faculty, students, and alumni are reimagining business and leading positive change in government and institutions throughout the nation and around the world. They engage with novel legal questions, emerging technologies, and urgent social issues. The NYU Law community is known for making an impact, and we must continue to prepare students for essential leadership roles, in both the private and the public sectors. Especially now, as foundational legal questions move to the forefront of debate and policy, a legal degree has never been more important.
As educators, we do more than teach our students to be rigorous legal thinkers and effective advocates; we encourage them to use their valuable skills in a fast-evolving world that will generate more—and more complicated—problems that need to be solved. We strive to prepare our students to pursue their goals, meet the cutting edge of the job market, and define success on their terms. As shown by the huge variety of career paths taken by our alumni (some of whom are profiled in the 2022 NYU Law Magazine), I firmly believe that no law school does this better than NYU Law.
One of my highest priorities as dean will be to continue to recruit world-class faculty to our already extraordinary Law School. This is particularly important as several of our esteemed faculty members have retired recently. Their invaluable experience and contributions have helped make the Law School the outstanding institution that it is. But they have left it in the excellent hands of their colleagues, the other exceptional teachers and scholars at NYU Law. This year alone, we welcome five new faculty members: Brittany Farr, Daniel Francis, Brant Hellwig, Daniel Hemel, and Avani Mehta Sood, all of whose incisive and significant scholarship you can read about in the 2022 NYU Law Magazine.
I also believe that keeping an NYU Law education within the financial reach of our students remains crucial for the future of our institution, allowing us to attract brilliant and dedicated students no matter what their circumstances. The Law School has already worked hard to prioritize student success, increasing aid and the number of scholarships, and will continue to make this an area of emphasis. Among other things, I intend to take some of the lessons we have learned from the pandemic to better inform how we support our community.
The 2022 NYU Law Magazine is a terrific celebration of NYU Law’s past year, commemorating many of the people who make this such a special place. I very much look forward to what we will accomplish in the next year.
Warmly,
Posted September 8, 2022