MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN
Dear Pace Law alumni,
“I am enormously thankful for the support that so many of you have given to me and to the Law School over the past four years. I am proud to be part of the Pace Law family…”
As I write, we are preparing to graduate the Class of 2018. It has been another superb year at the Law School. I often use metrics to summarize, and all of ours are outstanding: our graduate employment rate for the Class of 2017 was the top in our peer group (for the second year in a row!); applications for next year’s entering class grew by twice the national average; and our bar pass rate went up by 6 points. We are not resting on this success. My faculty colleagues and I continue aggressively to strengthen our program and to innovate. Last year’s highest priority was to turbocharge our environmental law specialty by implementing the initiatives funded by the Haub family, and we have sustained that momentum. We added a dynamic, nationally known climate change expert, Katrina Fischer Kuh, to our faculty. We enrolled another promising cohort of Haub Scholars. Our firstin-the-nation Food and Beverage Law Clinic is solidly established, and New York State policymakers are looking at it as a model for other areas. This year, we turned our focus to the Criminal Practice concentration. The Law School has great strength in this area: excellent faculty members, clinical programs with both district attorneys and public defenders, and a large network of alumni in criminal practice. Last year, for example, nearly 15% of the graduating class went to D.A. offices. I believe we are the best school in the New York area for students seeking careers in criminal practice, and I want everyone to know it. So this year, we both expanded our substantive program and also undertook to showcase it. In the curriculum, we added a new class on “Best Practices in Prosecution” and another on “Use of Forensic Evidence.” We brought a former highlevel Assistant United States Attorney, Mimi Rocah, to campus as a Distinguished Fellow in Criminal Justice. In addition to teaching a popular course on Federal Prosecution, Mimi is a regular (almost daily these days) commentator on national news networks, which has given us marvelous visibility. Thanks to the generosity of Robert Tucker ’96, we established the Robert Tucker Award for Prosecutorial Excellence. The inaugural award ceremony, honoring Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, drew dozens of New York’s top criminal justice policymakers. These are just the latest elements of the work we started four years ago to revitalize Pace Law in the midst of the historic, post-Recession disruption in legal
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PA C E L AW A L U M N I M A G A Z I N E