Q. Where are you from? Q. Where did your career go next? A. I grew up in Chicago—in A. I clerked for a judge and had a wonderful experience ..........................................
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the city and the suburbs. My dad was an air traffic controller, so we moved around a bit.
as a law clerk. I learned a lot about professionalism, civility and modesty. To this day, I value that wonderful educational experience. Then I went from being a law clerk to practicing at a large corporate firm in Chicago. I was a young litigator, and I loved being a litigator. I had the good fortune to not be assigned to any large, giant cases where I was lost in a team of 25 or 30. I was the utility player as an associate and was able to handle many relatively small cases. So I was able to learn a lot in a short period of time. But I was restless for the academic life, for the profession. I left relatively soon to start teaching. But even after becoming a professor, I remained active in practice, first for the firm that I had worked for. Down the road, I developed an expertise as an appellate lawyer and have done a lot of practice in that area throughout all the years I’ve been in the academic profession.
Q. What drew you to the legal profession?
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A. I got interested in law my
senior year at Yale. You could say I wandered into law school. No one in my family had gone to college before me, let alone law school. I had one cousin who was a priest. That was the farthest along anyone in my extended family had ever gone into higher education. I went to Yale originally to play football and gradually became a more serious student as I progressed through college. I became very passionate about American studies. For me that was a cross between American history and American literature. I toyed with going to graduate school in American studies, but this was a time in which teaching jobs at American universities were scarce, and graduate school, for that reason, didn’t seem as inviting. But I’d been fortunate at Yale to take a number of courses as an undergrad from law professors. I also had a number of friends who were law students. The combination of taking courses from law professors and knowing a number of law students who were very turned on by what they were experiencing was probably what drew me to law school. I went directly from undergraduate to law school. The practice of taking time off—which I think is a great thing to do—just wasn’t done as much back in those days. So I went to law school and was one of those rare students who completely enjoyed every minute of it. I shocked myself in doing well academically. Everyone else seemed so much smarter than me. I had so little conception of what it was to be a lawyer. I had no frame of reference in terms of my family life compared to many of the other students. I had never met a lawyer prior to college.
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Q. How did you end up in the dean’s office at the University of Richmond?
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A. Another accident. I was as happy as could be as a profes-
sor, as a writer, as a practitioner, and really had never given much thought to academic leadership. The Richmond Law School had a change in leadership—the dean resigned—and a number of my colleagues encouraged me to apply. It was a huge turning point for me, because once I became a dean, it felt as if I had finally found what I was supposed to be doing as a professional. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, how fulfilling it was. I’ve never looked back from that first day of starting down the road as an educational administrator.
Q. What attracted you to W&L? A. I had been fortunate for years to know many of the
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members of the faculty here. I had been invited to campus a number of times as guest lecturer. So on that personal sense, I had a real affection for W&L. It also has a tremendously favorable reputation nationally. It is a very special school. I had also become very connected to the Virginia legal community over the years, and so even though W&L is a national law school, the fact that it was located in Virginia, where I could still be a leader in the legal community that I’d become very attached to, was very appealing.
Q. What do you think makes W&L unique? A. I think that relatively small size, coupled with the tradi-
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tion of putting the student’s development at the center of
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