Welcome from the Dean

Welcome from the Dean of the Law School

Dear Incoming Northwestern Law Student:

Welcome and thank you for choosing Northwestern Law. Within your excellent academic qualifications, strong interpersonal skills, and life experience, you no doubt had several law schools from which to choose. I am very pleased that you will join our community this fall.

This is an exciting time to be at Northwestern Law, as we are building the great law school and preparing great leaders for the changing world through the initiatives of our 1998 Strategic Plan and our just completed update, entitled Plan 2008. Plan 2008 has resulted from two-years of systematic research on legal education and industry trends, alumni career trajectories, and frank focus group discussions with more than 200 students, faculty, alumni, and industry leaders throughout the US and London. Through this comprehensive effort, we have identified the competencies that your future employers need you to have, whether in private practice, public service, or academia. And through the innovations that we are already planning, you will be uniquely prepared to achieve maximum career success when you graduate.

As you will soon discover, the Northwestern Law Difference begins with our team-centered and supportive environment. Rather than promoting aggressive, cutthroat competition, as is often found at many top American law schools, we foster a cooperative learning community that empowers students to develop their leadership, team, organizational, and professional abilities to the fullest. Our strategic plan is to advance Northwestern Law to the very top tier of law schools, and we believe that our supportive, student-led community is an essential element in achieving that goal. Our cooperative culture is one of our greatest assets because it takes advantage of our excellent students, faculty, and staff who all participate in the educational process. Moreover, the friendships and networks you will build at Northwestern Law will be some of the most enduring of both your personal and professional life.

It all starts with our unique admissions program. We seek students with varied experience who will thrive in our community that is based on mutual respect for differing ideas, perspectives, and backgrounds. As the only major law school to strongly encourage (and soon require) all applicants to interview, we have treated each applicant as an individual, enabling us to recognize interpersonal skills and other attributes that are beyond a written application’s power to convey. Almost every one of your classmates has at least one year of full-time, post-undergraduate work experience, and most have at least two years of such experience. I think you will find in sharing perspectives in the classroom and in social settings, that students with work experience enrich the learning experience for all students.

The size of our entering class will remain around 240 (consisting of 215 JD and 25 JD-MBA) students, and our student-faculty ratio of 10:1 is one of the lowest in the country. In 2000 we reduced all of the sections in our required first-year courses to about 50 to 60 students, which has enhanced student participation and interaction with faculty. You will have ready access to our distinguished professors and teachers who have the highest and most interdisciplinary educational credentials of any law school and who continue to influence today’s leading academic and public policy issues.

Opportunities for student-student and student-faculty learning and interaction continue to increase within our team-based curriculum, which you will experience from the beginning in your Communication and Legal Reasoning course. In addition, the more than 40 student organizations that thrive on campus provide numerous opportunities for teamwork and leadership. Responding to students’ myriad interests, backgrounds, and needs, student organizations plan and sponsor an array of special programs and events each year including Public Interest Law Week, Diversity Week, and Feminist Women and the Law Symposium.

Northwestern Law students have tremendous ideas and abilities that they invest in enhancing our community. They were instrumental in helping us to develop our strategic plan in 1998 and Plan 2008, and the faculty and I continue to rely on their efforts to improve the Law School. I meet regularly with the Executive Committee of the Student Bar Association, the Law School’s student government, to work on key areas in which we can improve our Law School. Students also serve on committees or as liaisons to every important function at the Law School including our admissions and faculty appointment committees. In the end, Northwestern Law is now your school and it will be your school from this time on; I urge you to invest in it in every way you can.

Sincerely,
David E. Van Zandt