News

August 2003

A Letter from Dean Van Zandt: Welcome Back to Northwestern Law

Dear Students:

I hope you are enjoying your summer. As I do each year, I write to bring you up to date on the changes that have occurred at Northwestern Law and the key developments that await you.

The 2002-2003 academic year ended on a high note with Sen. Paul Simon (below) delivering the graduation address. Neil O'Connor, a 1974 JD graduate, also continued the tradition of an alumnus welcoming a graduating class that includes one of his or her children. Neil's son, Neil O’Connor Jr., was a member of the JD class of 2003.

We've had a busy and productive three months and are looking forward to welcoming the incoming classes for orientation on August 22. Orientation has been planned by second-year students Hudson Hollister and Adam Smith (JD and JD-MBA programs) and 2003 LLM graduate Laura Vargas (LLM international program), who worked closely with the Student Affairs team. The week of activities includes community service projects, networking workshops, and a trip to Wrigley Field on Monday, September 1. It’s a great opportunity for incoming students to relax, meet classmates, and hopefully watch the Chicago Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals.

Many second- and third-year JD students have returned to the Law School this week to take part in on-campus interviewing (OCI), which began August 18 (see OCI schedule). We will welcome all students back on September 2 (see the academic calendar).

We look forward to welcoming you back soon. Please enjoy all that you are doing and return ready to go for an exciting year.

Sincerely,

David E. Van Zandt

Links to key developments:

ADMISSIONS: Jump in Applications Leads to Most Impressive Entering JD, JD/MBA Classes Yet CAREER STRATEGY: First-job Placement Rate at Graduation Improves in 2003 FACULTY: Welcome Nine New Residential Faculty Faculty Departures COMMUNITY: Justice Anthony Kennedy and Others to Participate in Endowed Lecture Series Public Service Program Kicks Off with Day of Service Record Amount of Funds Raised for Student Events Last Year Hundreds of Alumni Returning to Campus for Reunions in October

CURRICULAR PROGRAMS: Lawyer as Problem Solver Program for First-year Students in Fall and Spring New Fall Courses Colloquium Series Brings Experts to the Law School Bluhm Legal Clinic: Winning Cases and Reforming Laws Joint Law and Journalism Program Begins Law School and Kellogg Take Collaborative Approach to Executive Education RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGY: Building Renovations and Technology Upgrades Accommodate Expanding Student Body Exclusive catering service chosen; Harry’s Café under new management

ADMISSIONS:

Jump in Applications Leads to Most Impressive Entering Class Yet

The Law School experienced a significant increase in applications this year: from 4,439 JD applicants last year to 5,222 this year, an 18 percent jump. About 240 JD students will enroll this year (including 22 JD/MBA students), a number comparable to last year; 30 transfer students will also be joining us. In June, 22 students from 12 countries joined us to begin studying in the year-long Graduate Program in Law and Business (LLM/Kellogg). About 65 general LLM students from 26 countries and five international two-year JD students will also join us this fall. In the LLM Tax program, there will be 25 full-time students as well as nine new part-time students, and six joint JD and LLM Tax students. We also welcome the first five students in the new joint law and journalism program (MSL/MSJ) with the Medill School of Journalism.

In addition to the hard work of everyone on our Admissions team, many of you deserve credit for our continued improvement in attracting the students we want. During their campus visits and Day at Northwestern Law, the incoming students' interactions with many of you played an important role in their decisions to attend Northwestern Law.

Our unique admissions interview program continues to grow in scope. Alumni and student volunteers helped the Admissions team interview 3,100 applicants this year. As we have begun to interview more applicants, our student body has become not only more diverse but also academically stronger. The median LSAT score of this year's entering JD class is 169, up one point from last year and up five points from 1996. The middle range of LSAT scores - the 25th to 75th percentiles - also rose to 166-170 in 2003 compared to 165-169 last year and 159-167 in 1996.

Our message about the importance of work experience is also making an impact. This year, 93 percent of the entering JD class of 2005 have at least one year of work experience; 68 percent have two or more years; 100 percent of JD/MBA, LLM, and LLM/Kellogg students have work experience.

Today's classes also represent more geographic diversity than those of a few years ago. This fall, 70 percent of first-year JD students come from outside the Midwest, making for perhaps the most regionally diverse first-year class at any law school.

CAREER STRATEGY:

First-job Placement Rate at Graduation Improves in 2003

We are pleased to report that we had an impressive first-job placement record at the end of the last school year. At graduation, 95 percent of the class of 2003 was employed. This numbers are actually up from last year’s numbers despite a limited and difficult economy. The Center for Career Strategy and Advancement has done an excellent job of helping students execute effective job searches during these tough times and is preparing students to manage their careers in any economic environment.

Much of our success can be attributed to the fact that our Career Strategy Center offers more educational programming and individualized attention than most other law schools.
In addition to helping students plan and develop searches for summer employment and first jobs, the center helps students and alumni recognize and pursue opportunities as they embark on multi-job careers, in which their first jobs will be, in most cases, just the first in a series of wonderful opportunities.

Throughout the year, we visit hiring partners and recruiting partners around the country to gather feedback and to market the Law School and our students. This year, we have added to our eight-member staff, an associate director, Julie LaEace, who will be working with International LLM and LLM Tax students. Through one-on-one counseling, workshops, mock interview programs, recruitment programs, job posting databases, and other programming, we give all of our students the tools to conduct their own effective job searches in parallel with off-campus job fairs, resume collection programs, and the on-campus interviewing (OCI) program.

This year, OCI has begun early, in August instead of September (see OCI schedule). We decided to to move OCI up a couple weeks after conducting an extensive benchmarking study with peer schools. As we found that a greater percentage of top schools have shifted recruiting programs to earlier in the cycle, we realized that having recruiters at Northwestern concurrently would be crucial to the success of our program. A small second phase of OCI will take place in September.

In looking ahead at what is to be expected of the job market this year, it is important to remember that the legal profession has not been immune to the effects of the economic downturn. Placement patterns at all of the nation’s top schools have been impacted.

Legal employers have reacted to market conditions by shrinking the size of summer associate programs and reducing the number of new associates hired. There is little indication that the economy will experience a sustained recovery or growth in the coming year, and we expect the demand for law school graduates to remain about the same.

That being said, we continue to focus our overall strategy on admitting and educating students who will be more attractive to employers in all economic environments. Strong interpersonal skills, prior work experience, and excellent academic abilities help to render our graduates the most attractive for employment opportunities regardless of economic conditions.

Another one of our goals is to place more students in judicial clerkships. On September 2, JD and JD/MBA students in the class of 2004 will begin the process of searching for clerkships available for the 2004 term. At that time, applications and letters of recommendation can be mailed to judges. While some federal judges in major cities will begin to interview shortly after that date, many other federal and state judges will be considering applications from third-year students into next year.

We strongly urge you to apply. The benefits of clerkships are exceptional. The experience gained by working with a federal or state judge is foundational for any career path -- whether in transactional work, litigation, business, or public interest -- and will broaden career opportunities.

A record 30 Northwestern Law graduates will serve as law clerks for the 2003 term (see historical clerkship data). And 2003 graduate Jeff Oldham will clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist during the 2004 term. This year, the Faculty Clerkship Committee, chaired by Professor James Speta, will work with Melisa Rosado to lead our clerkship efforts.

FACULTY:

Welcome Nine New Residential Faculty

We continue to actively recruit talented scholars and teachers as we seek to carry out our strategic initiative to develop and retain an internationally renowned research and teaching faculty. We have had significant success in attracting the following new research faculty:

New Research Faculty:

• Emerson Tiller, an expert in the role of political forces in regulatory and judicial decision-making, joins us as a professor of law and will also have a courtesy appointment at the Kellogg School of Management. Emerson first came to Northwestern in fall 2002 as a visiting professor from the business school at the University of Texas. This fall, he will teach two sections of Contracts.
• Ronen Avraham, an expert in economic analysis of torts, property, and contracts, joins us as an assistant professor of law after serving as a visiting assistant professor of law in 2002-2003. This fall, he will teach a section of Torts and the Law and Economics Colloquium with Rob Sitkoff.
• Max Schanzenbach, an empirical researcher with interests in labor economics and antitrust law, joins us as an assistant professor of law. He will teach a section of Business Associations in the fall.

New Senior Lecturers: Elaine S. McChesney, a former member of the corporate group at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, will teach Copyright and Structuring Transactions in the fall and Intellectual Property in the spring. Stephen Smith, a former trial lawyer and arbitral and mediation advocate, will teach International Arbitration and International Sales in the fall.

New Clinical Faculty: Bridget Arimond, a former civil rights attorney, joins us as a clinical assistant professor of law and as assistant director of the Center for International Human Rights Andrea Matwyshyn, a commercial law specialist, with an emphasis in information technology, joins us as a clinical assistant professor of law in the Small Business Opportunity Center

New to the Communication and Legal Reasoning Program:

Maurine J. Berens, a former legal writing and research instructor at DePaul University, joins us as a clinical assistant professor of law.		James A. Lupo, a former instructor of legal writing and advocacy at Loyola University Chicago, joins us a clinical assistant professor of law.
Visiting Professors: Gregory A. Caldeira, from Ohio State University, will be our Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law and will teach a course on the Supreme Court in the fall and a section on Constitutional Law and Comparative Constitutional Law in the spring. Chris Guthrie, from Vanderbilt University, will teach a section of Contracts in the fall. Sharon Hannes, from Tel-Aviv University School of Law, will teach Advanced Issues in Corporate Theory for six weeks in the fall. Saikrishna B. Prakash, from the University of San Diego, will teach Securities Regulation in the spring Visiting Scholars: Henry Manne, Professor Emeritus at George Mason University School of Law, will be our Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Residence. Terukazu Tanaka joins us as a visiting scholar for fall 2003. Guy Seidman joins us as the 2003-2004 Searle Fellow. Charles Keckler joins us as the 2003-2004 Olin Fellow.		Visiting Assistant Professors (VAP): Kristin Hickman, a 2000 JD graduate of Northwestern Law, will teach a section of Administrative Law in the fall and a section of Business Associations in the spring. Michael S. Pardo, a 2001 JD graduate of Northwestern Law, will teach Constitutional Criminal Procedure in the fall and a section of Evidence in the spring. Donna Shestowsky, who earned her JD and PhD in Psychology from Stanford University, will teach a section of Negotiations in the fall, as part of our joint VAP/Post-doctorate program with the Kellogg Management and Organization Department. Yarviv Brauner, who earned his LLM in Tax and his SJD from New York University, will teach Federal Taxation for Foreign Lawyers in the fall and Advanced International Corporate Tax Problems in the spring. Allison Christians, who earned her JD from Columbia University and LLM in Tax from New York University, will teach International Taxation in the fall and Advanced International Taxation in the spring. Andrea Monroe, who earned her JD from the University of Michigan and LLM in Tax from New York University, will teach Tax Procedure in the fall and Entity Taxation in the spring.

Faculty Departures

Professors Richard Speidel and Stephen Goldberg have retired but will remain a part of the Northwestern Law community as Professors of Law Emeritus. Both may continue to teach on a limited basis.

An excellent school must always work hard to keep its best faculty. The academic market for the best scholars is very competitive today. Recognizing the excellence of our faculty, other law schools regularly court the rising scholars we have recently attracted, as well as distinguished long-term members of our research faculty.

I am sorry to report that Professors Richard Brooks and Thomas Merrill have left Northwestern. Rick has accepted an offer to join the faculty at Yale Law School while Tom has joined the Columbia law faculty. While we will surely miss them, we wish them the best of luck in their new endeavors.

CURRICULAR PROGRAMS:

We continue to revise and expand our curriculum to meet the needs of the changing world. With the help of excellent adjunct faculty and visiting professors in addition to our residential faculty, we are able to offer as broad and diverse a curriculum as substantially larger law schools.

Lawyer as Problem Solver Program for First-year Students in Fall and Spring

First year students will attend the award winning Lawyer as Problem Solver (LPS) program again this year. The interactive LPS curriculum provides perspective as well as training in creativity, decision making, negotiation, communication, conflict management, ethics, and counseling for the modern lawyer. At Northwestern Law, we believe in emphasizing these areas at the start of legal education and reinforcing them in the upper-class courses.

The format of the program has changed from the previous two years. Instead of a full day of programming in the spring, LPS will be split into four two-hour modules: two will take place in the fall, September 19 and October 3, and two will take place in the spring, January 15 and February 26 (spring dates still tentative).

The classroom components will be complemented by social events for participants as well as opportunities to interact with representatives from the legal community and faculty, many of whom do not typically teach first year courses.

New Fall Courses

To find out more about any of these courses, click here.

Clinical Practice: Mental Health Issues in Juvenile Court (Julie Biehl and Barbara Kahn)
The Cook County Juvenile Court Clinic operation encompasses a wide range of activities designed to provide legal professionals with mental health or "clinical" information. As part of the course work, students will observe juvenile court proceedings, participate in intake interviews of families or youths who have been referred to the Cook County Juvenile Court Clinic, and engage in research on issues that arise in the course of actual practice.

Children in Trouble with the Law (Bernardine Dohrn)
In this course, students will examine the changing constructions of childhood reflected in the law. The class will analyze critical constitutional rights case law, case studies, and potential legal remedies through the contending themes of children's rights, children's participation, child protection, social control, and punishment.

Advanced Issues in Corporate Theory (Sharon Hannes)
Students will examine a broad range of corporate law issues that are currently being discussed by corporate academics. Topics to be covered include corporate acquisitions (sales of control blocks, corporate freeze outs, defensive tactics, lock-ups), the corporate contract, state competition, and the corporate ownership structure (dispersion vs. concentration).

Structuring Transactions: Intellectual Property Rights (Elaine McChesney)
This course will focus on the structuring, negotiation, and documentation of transactions involving technology of varying kinds and the intellectual property rights associated with such technology. Students will analyze from differing perspectives and negotiate and draft the documents necessary to secure intellectual property rights and realize the financial or other gain from such rights.

Structuring Transactions: Financial Transactions (Tom Brown)
In this course, students will focus on the structuring, documentation, negotiation, and closing of financial transactions, with a view toward better understanding the common principles that underlie most financial transactions. Throughout the course, they will examine sample documentation used in transactions, the expectations of the parties to these transactions, and the often critical role of third parties.

Structuring Transactions: Real Estate (Edward Malstrom)
The course will focus on the structuring, documentation and negotiation of real estate transactions from a practitioner's perspective. Students will work individually and in groups in each of the major facets of real estate development, including sales/acquisitions, leasing, construction, mortgaging and zoning.

Colloquium Series Brings Experts to the Law School

The Colloquium Series introduces faculty and students to leading scholars specializing in particular legal areas or topics. This fall, scholars will visit the Law School to exchange views about cutting-edge research on legal and constitutional history, law and economics, and empirical legal studies. The colloquium series will focus on public and constitutional law in the spring.

The Law and Economics Colloquium, the Legal and Constitutional History of the United States Colloquium, and the Empirical Legal Studies Colloquium are similarly structured. Northwestern faculty and students attend six colloquia workshops at which a leading scholar presents a paper growing out of his or her research.

Any interested Northwestern Law student may attend the presentations. Up to 15 students can enroll each semester in a seminar that is taught in conjunction with the colloquium. Participation in workshops is mandatory for students enrolled in the seminar.

Bluhm Legal Clinic: Winning Cases and Reforming Laws

Bluhm Legal Clinic students and faculty have recently won an unprecedented number of cases for clients in juvenile, appellate, political asylum, wrongful conviction, and criminal matters. And thanks, in part, to the work of many Northwestern students and faculty, this summer Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed into law the first statute requiring police officers to electronically record interrogations of suspects in homicide cases.

In the area of juvenile justice and political asylum, faculty and students in the Children and Family Justice Center obtained an acquittal on a murder charge (the client was found guilty of a lesser offense) on behalf of a juvenile in a rare juvenile court jury trial and won political asylum on behalf of five clients in proceedings before immigration judges and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services). Students and faculty in the clinic also won a not guilty verdict on behalf of Maria Gabriel, who was charged with the murder of her infant daughter.

In the area of wrongful convictions, faculty and students working in the Center on Wrongful Convictions were successful with three major cases involving clients Michael Evans, who walked out of prison for the first time in 27 years when DNA testing excluded him as a source of the genetic material found on the murder victim; Dana Holland (right, center with Karen Daniel and students who worked on the case), who was freed after serving 10 years for a rape and aggravated assault when DNA tests proved his innocence; and Randy Steidl, whose petition for writ of habeas corpus was finally granted by a federal district court judge.

The Center for International Human Rights has been strengthened by the arrival of its new assistant director, Bridget Arimond, who has 25 years experience as a civil rights lawyer. She comes just in time to help the center in major litigation dealing with indefinite detentions of prisoners at Guantanamo without due process of law, the alleged involvement of a U.S. oil company in the bombing of a civilian village in Colombia, and other human rights issues around the world.

The enrollment capacity of the Small Business Opportunity Center will increase this year thanks to the addition of Andrea Matwyshyn to the faculty. This summer, the SBOC has been active in several low income Chicago neighborhoods where small business owners and community organizations are in need of legal assistance. Among new SBOC clients are Lawndale Business & Local Development Corp., which is sponsoring a job training center, and Quad Communities Development Corp., which is working on education, safety and business development issues in Chicago’s 4th Ward, south of the Loop.

Joint Law and Journalism Program Begins

The first five graduate students to participate in a joint-degree program being offered by the Law School and the Medill School of Journalism will join us this fall. We look for the same qualities in these students as we do in our JD students — maturity and ambition, prior work experience, and strong interpersonal and communication skills.

The students joining us have worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Chile Information Project in Santiago, Chile, and the International Crisis Group in Washington D.C.

The program of study which begins and ends at Medill (and includes a term as a reporter for the Medill News Service in Washington D.C. or an internationally based residency through Medill’s Global Journalism Program) involves two semesters of work at the Law School studying torts, criminal law, civil procedure, legal writing and electives of the student’s choice.

Upon completion of the program the students will earn both a Master of Science in Journalism and a Master of Studies in Law. The joint degrees will enable the journalists to understand the legal nuances involved in so many news stories today.

Law School and Kellogg Take Collaborative Approach to Executive Education

Joe Hannigan, who joined the Law School in June as Director of Executive Education and the Kellogg School of Management as Associate Director of Executive Education, hopes to tap into new executive education markets. By developing programs with Kellogg, he plans to meet the needs of non-lawyer professionals at a time when law and business are increasingly integrated.

Joe’s primary role will be to further engage Law School faculty in executive education programs. Some of these programs will be offered independently by the Law School and others will be jointly offered by the Law School and Kellogg. Joe has spent this summer directing Kellogg’s Advanced Executive Program. Under his leadership, we expect our emerging executive education partnership with Kellogg to be a great success.

COMMUNITY:

Justice Anthony Kennedy and Others to Participate in Endowed Lecture Series

There is much to look forward to this year, beginning with a visit from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (right) who will serve as the Howard J. Trienens Visiting Judicial Scholar, October 1-2. Although Justice Kennedy will not make a formal speech, he may participate in class discussions, hold informal meetings with students, faculty, and alumni, and perhaps give some informal remarks to student groups.

Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., United States Court of Appeals for the Ni

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