RISA GOLUBOFF: Good
morning, everyone. So good to see you all here. It is now my privilege
and duty to offer you the state of the law school. So I always try to
think about ways to offer you the state
of the law school that are not just
a series of facts and figures without anything
interesting to tie them together. So I was thinking
about how wonderful it has been this year
to have everybody back in the building after
COVID and the wonderful energy and joy that we
felt and that I feel every year when we are able
to be together for law alumni weekend. And so I thought I would frame
my remarks as a little tour of the building. Now, don't worry, it's not
going to be that kind of tour. And some of you may the building
better than others, some of you may have gone to
law school here. But regardless of
how familiar you are, you have not had my tour. So my tour I have entitled
The Dean's Extra Special Metaphysical Tour of
UVA Law School Complete with Commentary and Annotation. And the goal is for me
to share with you all of the amazing things that
go on here that our faculty, students, and staff
do all day every day, and the values
that underlie them by taking you into the
spaces where we do them. OK. So we start in the
front of the law school looking up at the
inscription over the doorway. This was written by Professor
Leslie Buchler in 1932, and it was originally emblazoned
over the doors of Clark Hall. And I will say that when I
speak to many of you who were in the Clark Hall building. You know these words by heart. They were emblazoned over
Clay Hall when we moved here, and they are still there. But they're not
quite as visible, and younger generations
don't them as well. So here is what they read. "That those alone
may be servants of the law who labor with
learning, courage, and devotion to preserve liberty
and promote justice. These words are so important. The law is not just a job. It is with medicine and
theology one of the three learned professions. Our graduates are entrusted
with knowledge and the license to practice law, and therefore
obligated to profess--" profession, "--the values
of preserving liberty and promoting justice
to do public good." And that is core to our
mission alongside educating our students for their careers
and creating new knowledge about the law as we
just saw in judge-- judge-- Professor Laycock. And I'm going to
share more below about how we discharge
this responsibility to prepare our students
for public service. So from the front
steps of the building, we head inside to the east
side to Walter Brown Hall, where many of our
classes take place and where most of our
faculty offices are located. We have a brilliant and
accomplished faculty, including many like
Professor Laycock, who are leaders in their field. We have long-serving faculty
members, who many of you will recall from your own days. Dick Howard, class of
'61, Richard Bonney, class of '69, John
Jeffries, class of '73, Alex Johnson, John
Harrison, Ruthie Bach, class of '88, as well as an
incredible group of newcomers who are talented and
diverse in every way. Over the past three years, we
have hired 20 new tenure line law faculty. And a faculty of 80,
that's a very large number. They have a wide array of
intellectual approaches, ideological perspectives,
subject matters, methodologies, and career stages. And what they share
is excellence, absolute excellence,
and deep excitement about joining this
wonderful community that is UVA Law School, where
I hope they have all found the welcome and the
intellectual stimulation that Doug just talked about. From the classrooms
in Brown Hall, we'll stop at our
beautiful law library, which is a hub for research,
scholarship, and study. So one day, one of my faculty
members was in the library, and he pulled out a treatise,
this old dusty treatise. And a piece of
paper fluttered down from the middle of the treatise. And he read it. And this is what it said. It said, "Dear weary
student, hello! I hope this letter
finds you well. May its contents bring
you encouragement. And if it has, then
I hope you will add your own piece
of inspiration so that future wanderers may to
find this uplifting," signed, one of you. Others had added their
own notes to the bottom of this letter over the
years, including our professor who put it back in
the stacks after he was done with the treatise. And this story-- I often tell facts
and figures, but I wanted to tell a few
stories today in addition because I think the
stories are really what tell you about the
culture of this place that you can't only from
the facts and figures. And what this shows you is
how different a law school we are from the horrors you
hear about the paper chase image of people tearing
out pages and not sharing it with each other. This is the exact
opposite of that. This is a student who took the
time to write to other students saying you're not alone, we're
here, we're in this together. And our students are ambitious,
and they strive for excellence. And they are deeply
competitive, as are our faculty and our administration. Deeply competitive,
but we do all that to be our individual best. And we do it to be our
best together, not alone. And our community makes
us better together. And we do it for that
community and not despite it. As you all know, out
students meet their friends, their colleagues, their
life partners here. And that is a result
of our culture. So speaking of our
student culture, from Walter Brown
Hall, we'll walk to the back of the law school
to the HMZ's class of 1975 Student Faculty Center
which houses Scott Commons. Scott Commons is the hub of our
student life at the law school. You walk into Scott Commons,
and it is buzzing with activity. And everyone is there,
and they're eating, and they're having
coffee, and they're chatting with one another. This is where
student life happens. And student life is
unbelievably robust. We have approximately 70
active student organizations at the law school right
now, including and plus 10 student journals, student
academic journals. Our organizations span the gamut
from subject matter interest groups to pre-professional
groups to political groups to affinity groups. And because of how diverse our
students are and how boundless their energy, there are
new student organizations popping up all the time. Newer groups range this year
from the Plaintiff's Law Association to the Virginia
Ski and Snowboard Society to the Orthodox Christian
Law Student Association. And these organizations
are crucial to the thriving of our students
at the law school. And our students do it
better than anybody else. And they frequent--
I say that not-- I know that to be
true in my heart-- but in addition,
they frequently get regional and
national recognition. Our Black Law
Students Association won the mid-Atlantic chapter
of the year again this year. That is the seventh
time in recent years, including last year. And they also frequently win the
National Chapter of the Year. [APPLAUSE] In addition, our
Federalist Society hosted the National
Student Symposium last year at which Governor Glenn Youngkin
gave the keynote address. And they won National
Chapter of the Year in 2020. So our student orgs-- this is what we do at UVA,
student self-governance, right? So it's not a surprise that
our student organizations are so robust and so vital. They've been especially
active this year as we've come back
from the pandemic and been fully in-person. It's been my highest
priority to make sure that we don't lose our
culture, given that disruption. But I can only do so
much from the top. And every time I met
with student groups over the course of the year, I'd
say, what are your priorities? I say, oh, we're going to
come back after the pandemic. We're community-building
after-- I was like, OK, we're all on the same page. This is great. We're doing the same
thing that you're doing. This year, this spring,
for example, we just hosted or the North Ground
Softball League just hosted the 40th annual
softball league Invitational that was a three-day event for
more than 1,000 participants from 37 law schools. And they also raised $37,000
for our Public Interest Law Association and a local charity. All of our students
are out at this event. And I will tell you all of the
law students from elsewhere are like, is this how
you live all the time? We say, of course, it is, right? So our students are just-- they are institution builders. They're institution
builders for themselves, they're institution builders
for other law students. And you all know because you
all become those institution builders wherever you
go in your careers. So the panel that's going
to be coming up in a minute will have a lot more to say
about the student experience. But I will just note that
our internal sense of success on how wonderful our
student experience has been validated once again
this year in the most recent Princeton Review rankings. We were voted again number
one for Best Quality of Life for the ninth year in a row. So that's pretty amazing. [APPLAUSE] I do have some numbers
to share with you. Yeah, just the best ones. We also remain in the top
five in Princeton Review for Best Professors, Best
Classroom Experience, Best Career Prospects, and
Best Federal Clerkships. This unparalleled
student experience is critically important to
the thriving of our students and I think to their
success as lawyers. It is what sets
us apart and what continues to bring us the best
and the brightest students year after year. So I want to brag for a
moment about our students as we hit the next stop on our
tour, Slaughter Hall, which is where we're
sitting this morning. And in particular, the Karsh
Student Services Center, which is the newest
part of the law school. You can see it in that
atrium just behind us. This is where our student
services offices are as well as the law school foundation. I always like to joke
with our students, the first floor of the
Karsh Center is admissions. It's where we admit you,
it's where we welcome you in. The second floor is
career development. That's where we get you a job
and launch you on your career. And the third floor
is the foundation. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] You know what we do
in the foundation. OK. So I will start
on the first floor with our terrific admissions
and financial aid offices. Our first year class that
is just finishing right now is the academically
strongest we have ever had. They have a median LSAT
score of 171 out of 180, and a median GPA
of 3.94 out of 4. I know. They are also the
most racially diverse, and they are also
with this class at 50% women, the first
time in our history that our student body
has had more women in it than men by 24 students. [APPLAUSE] We had another very competitive
admission cycle this year with more than 5,000-- sorry, there's
something in my eye-- with more than 5,500 applicants. We won't exactly what
the incoming class looks like for certain, but
we they are looking equally talented and terrific. We continue to
spend a lot of time about how to make
sure that this law school and the legal
profession are open to all and to make sure that
there is real access to the legal profession. And we launched a new
initiative last year that I am super excited about
called the Roadmap Scholars Initiative. This initiative is open to
first generation college students as well as students
from low income backgrounds. We launched it last
summer with major support from the Jefferson Trust, the
Horace W Goldsmith Foundation, and alumni donors. Our first cohort of 12
rising juniors in college spent a month with
us last summer. They took classes from
our regular faculty, they heard from leaders
in the profession. Those students then went
back to their campuses during the year this year,
and took LSAT classes that we paid for. And they'll come back to us
for a week of boot camp for law school applications. And then we have placed
them in internships. And they will spend
their summers this summer in legal internships. And we have paid for all of it. It is all expenses
paid plus stipends to enable them to
forego employment income over the summer. And so this year we
have our second cohort coming for the first
time and our first cohort coming for the second time. Let me know if you are
interested in being an alumni mentor. Each of our students has
an alumni mentor as well as a student mentor. Or if you might be
interested in hosting an intern in a future year. Mark Jefferson is
leading that program. And I saw that he
just walked in. So you can talk to him
if you are interested. I have to say, we are just
thrilled about this program. There are lots of pipeline
programs out there, but none are as
comprehensive as this one. Meant to provide all of the
different kinds of resources that students with means have
and students without means don't have, not only
financial but personal, internships,
networking, information about how the process works. We are very excited that
it will pay dividends both for our law school and
for the profession as a whole. All right. The next stop on our tour is the
second floor of Slaughter Hall. That is the home to our in-house
clinical education program. Our clinical program
is divided into in-house and external clinics. And we now have 24
different clinics. Some are litigation clinics,
some are transactional clinics, some are policy clinics
that enable our students to hit the practice world
on the ground running with the experience, the
integrity, the judgment, and the humanity that the best
lawyers, UVA lawyers all have. Now, the clinics share
the second floor, as I said before, with our
incredible career development team. And Kevin Donovan
has just walked in. You'll hear more
from him in a minute. We have three different
and amazing career development offices dedicated
to the private sector, public service, and clerkship. So Kevin we'll talk a
lot more about this. But I just want to
let you know some of the extraordinary
career outcomes that our students have achieved
with the unbelievable help and support of our career
development offices. So for the class of 2022--
we don't yet have the class of 2023 data-- 98.5% of our students
were employed. 98.5%, right? That is just an
incredible number. And the even-- [APPLAUSE] And even more incredible number
I think is that more than 95% of our 2022 grads are in the
creme de la creme of law jobs. The ABA categorizes
all the jobs, and these are the full time,
long term jobs requiring a law degree. We are number one in
the country for placing our students in those jobs
Thanks to Kevin and his shop. [APPLAUSE] We are also number five
in the Elite 100, which are our students going to
federal clerkships or large law firm jobs. The market is changing,
the market is challenging, both what it looks
like out there and how the process
works in here. But our career
development office is always innovating
and always thinking how to stay abreast of it. And our 1Ls and 2Ls who are
in the market and where-- or rising 2Ls and 3Ls are
already in the market. And those outcomes are
looking terrific as well, even as the landscape
is obviously shifting. On the public service side,
over the last few years, we have seen an
increasing number of graduates entering
public service directly upon graduation. They are prosecutors
and public defenders. They're joining honors programs
at the Department of Justice, the Department of Interior. They're entering impact
litigation and legal aid, receiving national
fellowships to do so. Important to that and going back
to the Leslie Buchler quote, "above our doors,"
we have increased support for our students who
are interested in public service by a lot. We now have full public
service scholarships at the front end,
three-year scholarships for two students a year. So there are six in the
building at any time. We have post-graduate
fellowships that we have
increased the size of. We guarantee summer
funding to our students working in public service. And we've increased
the amount of funding that we provide there as well. These are just the highlights. There are other things too. And then probably
most significantly, we have increased access
to our loan forgiveness. And I often realize
people don't what I mean when I say loan forgiveness. So for our students who
are making $80,000 or less, we pay back their entire
loan payment for them while they are in jobs making
those amounts of money. If they make $100,000 or
less, we pay a prorated amount from to 80 to 100. And that is most significant
for our public service students who tend to make
$70,000 to $80,000 per year. But it is also a safety net
for all of our students. It applies-- we just
had a gift recently that enabled us to fully
endow this program, and it applies to any
law student whatever they are doing, if they are
making below those thresholds, we are paying their
loans back for them while they are in those jobs. [APPLAUSE] Clerkships are the third leg
of the three-legged stool of our career
development program. And in 2022 and the
2022 term, our graduates were in 104 clerkships. We are number four
in the country in recent years for
federal clerkships and number five in placement
of clerks at the Supreme Court of the United States. It is really our goal
to enable our students to enter the career
paths of their choice and to do what they
came here to do or that what they discovered
they loved once they got there. And the career
development support that we provide as well as
the financial support that we provide for our graduates
entering public service and the financial counseling
we provide for all of them makes that possible. All right our last stop-- don't get excited
that I'm done though, because I have a few things
to say about the last stop. Our last stop takes us
to Kaplan Pavilion, where you had breakfast, and
here to the Purcell Reading Room, two of the spaces
in the law school where we regularly host
events for our community. In any given semester, we
have literally scores of invited speakers, conferences,
symposia, guest lectures hosted by student
organizations, faculty members, career development, student
orgs, and the law school itself. The multitude of views
expressed at these events is hard to overstate. And it leads me to talk
about one of the things that I love most about UVA
Law School, one of the things that brought me here,
and one of the things that has sustained me
since I've been here. And that is that
we are a big tent. Our faculty, students, and
staff embody and embrace a broad array of perspectives,
viewpoints, politics, ideologies, experiences,
backgrounds, and life. And this means that we can and
do disagree with each other, sometimes passionately,
sometimes vehemently. And the free exchange of ideas
that results from all of that is a gift to our students,
it's a gift to our faculty and to the work that
our faculty produce. And it is also a key
part of our mission because free speech, free
expression, and the exchange of ideas are crucial to the
flourishing of our profession, our society, and our democracy. And so law schools have
to educate our students so that they can engage in
that free exchange of ideas and become lawyers who
support and facilitate it. And I know that many of you
are concerned about this because I've heard from a
number of you, and a lot of you have asked me questions over
the course of the weekend. So I want you to
how seriously we take this responsibility to
educate our students to engage in a free exchange of ideas and
to be a forum for those ideas. We articulate these as values
from the very first minute that our students enter the
building at orientation. Our policies on them are clear,
easily accessible, widely known, and regularly enforced. We do trainings
with our students at orientation, with our
student leaders at other times. And our goal is to be a
forum for full discussion across the political spectrum. So our policies allow
for peaceful protest, which is protected free speech. But they prohibit disruption. And we have and do make
clear to our students that disruption is unacceptable,
and all of our administrators are on board. And they are trained
and we continue to train them toward this end. But I can't emphasize enough,
it's not that we train them. It's that we are all on
board with this idea. And our student services folks,
and especially Sara Davies and Mark Jefferson,
who you hear more from, work all the time not
only at the macro level but at the micro level
with our students on how to have real conversations
across difference and how to respond
when speakers come in with whom they might disagree. Now, most of the
conversation you've probably heard about law schools and
the free exchange of ideas lately is about events, flash
points, controversial speakers who come in. But most of the free
exchange of ideas that happens at any law
school and certainly at ours happens in the classroom. We have faculty and
students from all across the political and
ideological spectrum. And the bread and butter
of what we do here is learn to talk
across difference, learn to analyze problems,
learn to hear every argument, and make the best arguments
for your side, which you can't do unless you're listening. And I think that we are
well positioned to do this, not only because we're a
big tent, but also because of our legendary collegiality. We help students foster
trust and real relationships across their differences
in which they are able to see each other
as whole human beings, and they find commonalities, and
they find shared experiences. And that actually
facilitates disagreement. It facilitates their ability
to say, you may have this view, but I know you as
this full person. So when we talk about
this view, we're going to really be
able to get somewhere. And as you know,
our students have so many different
interactions with one another on the softball field,
in the Libel Show, where they all participate
and they make fun of everyone, right? That is a crucial thing to do. As well as through our peer
advisors and our community fellows programs. In other words, our
relationships with each other, being a community of trust,
they facilitate a true exchange of ideas. Now that said, our law school,
like all institutions are is affected and buffeted
by all of the things that go on out in the world. I think left to our own
devices, we would be awesome. Our students come here
knowing that we're a big town. They come here seeking to
have conversations with people who disagree with them. They come here for
our collegiality. And yet outside
of the law school, there's political
polarization, there are generational divides
about free speech. There are social media,
which can be democratizing, but also so pernicious. There's curated news and
a lack of shared facts. And I think that we have a
better chance than anyone of doing this really,
really well because of all the benefits that we have. But it is the case that
we have to be vigilant because we are buffeted
and our students are buffeted by all that
is going on in the world. And so our students may not
get it right every time, but they work really
hard at it, as do we. And I'm so proud of the
work that they do here and proud of the
work that we do here and proud of our aspirations
to continue to educate lawyers who can see all the
different sides, who can talk to each other
across our differences, and who become lawyers who
support free speech out there in the world. My final thought. One last observation
about this last stop on my metaphysical
tour, about this room as it is used for this event
this weekend every year. And that is that it is filled
with you, UVA Law School alumni. Your ties to each other and
to this place are legendary, and they are a wonder to behold. This is one of the happiest
weekends of the year. And it is because
you all come back. You are crucial to the law
school's thriving and the law school's success, and I don't
only mean that financially. Although, of course, I do
mean it financially as well. I mean the dozens
of you who come back to teach and to
guest-lecture and visit to judge our 1L
oral arguments who serve as mentors to current
students, who speak to student groups and classes, who recruit
our students to join you in your work, and of
course, who return every spring to your reunions. The UVA Law School
community begins here in these buildings on
these grounds, which is why I want you to see them
as I do and see the values and the activities that
exist in these spaces. But you take that UVA
community with you when you go, and you bring the world
back to us when you return. And you make possible all of
the amazing learning, discovery, joy and intellectual
exchange that happens here every day in every
room, hallway, softball field, and garden through
your time, your support, your engagement,
and your friendship. And for that, I am
eternally grateful. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
