[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 98 (Tuesday, July 13, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8396-S8401]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS
______
SEIZING THE MILE
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise to commend John Sexton,
Dean of New York University Law School, for his many years of hard work
and dedication to the Law School, the residents of New York State, and
to the improvement of legal education for all Americans. Since 1988,
when Sexton became Dean, NYU Law School has become one of America's
finest law schools. Dean Sexton should be recognized for his efforts. I
ask that the text of ``John Sexton Seizing the Mile'' by Stephen
Englund be printed in the Congressional Record.
The text follows:
[From Lifestyles, Pre-Spring 1999]
John Sexton Seizing the Mile
(By Stephen Englund)
In the late spring of 1997, veteran reporter James Traub
asked, in a headline to a New York Times Magazine feature
article, ``Is NYU's law school challenging Harvard's as the
nation's best?'' It was a fair question. NYU Law had come a
long way in a short time. A law school that had been little
more than a commuter school at the end of World War II was,
by 1997, considered by anyone familiar with current
developments in legal education to be, as one professor said,
``one of the five or six law schools that could plausibly
claim to be among the top three in the country.''
Distinguished academics like Harvard's Laurence Tribe and
Arthur Miller had placed NYU (with their own school and with
Yale, Stanford and Chicago) in that group. As Tribe put it:
``The array of faculty that has moved to NYU over the last
decade or so has created a level of scholarship and
intellectual distinction and range that is extremely
impressive.''
In 1997, the notion that NYU's School of Law might be the
best was certainly provocative. But 18 months later, after an
astonishing (indeed unprecedented) day-long forum at the
school titled ``Strengthening Democracy in the Global
Economy''--a meeting that brought to Washington Square
President Clinton, Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair,
Italy's President Romano Prodi and Bulgaria's President Peter
Stoyanov, as well as First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and a
supporting cast of respected intellectuals and other
leaders--many people are answering Traub's question with a
resounding ``Yes!''
Indeed, the rise of NYU over the past few years has been
one of the most noted advances on the academic scene--with a
growing number of those both in the academy and at the bar
offering the view that NYU has become the nation's premier
site for legal education. For instance, Michael Ryan, senior
partner at New York's oldest law firm, Cadwalader,
Wickersham, and Taft--himself a Harvard Law School graduate--
told me: ``NYU is a more exciting and innovative place that
any other law school. The place combines the energy, vitality
and diversity like that of the Lexington Avenue subway with
the cohesiveness and spirit. The school's innovative global
initiative is alone worth the price of admission. If I were a
student, I'd choose it over any other school.'' Chief Judge
Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia Circuit, viewed by many as the nation's
second most important court, said virtually the same thing:
NYU is absolutely the place to be these days. I hear more
comments about the quality, excitement, and originality of
what's going on there than I do about any other law school.''
As did Pasquale Pasquino, one of Europe's foremost political
theorists, who is teaching at the law school this year''
``NYU surely has the most prominent, the most productive and
the most interesting faculty. Its programs raise some of
the most interesting questions raised in any law school.''
And when I spoke with Dwight Opperman, who for decades was
the leader of West Publishing, the world's largest
publisher of law books, he volunteered: ``NYU surpasses
Harvard in many areas.''
Frankly, when I first read Traub's article, and even more
when I began to hear views like those of Ryan, Edwards,
Pasquino and Opperman, I was more than a little bit
surprised. How was it that NYU had come to be seen as
seriously challenging--or even surpassing--``name brand''
schools like Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Stanford? And how had
it happened so quickly? As a former academic, I know that the
academy is one of the least variable theaters on the world
stage. Far more than in other realms, reputations of
colleges, universities and professional schools are improved,
if at all at a glacial creep, though they may decline
precipitously. Little wonder, then, that NYU's rise to the
top of legal education continues to be the topic of so much
discussion.
What does explain NYU's ascendancy? Well, one key element
is surely the astonishing migration of academic stars from
other leading law schools to Washington Square. In academe,
it is big news when an established professor at a leading
school makes a ``lateral move'' to a peer institution--even
more so when the professor leaves a distinguished chaired
professorship in making the move. In legal education, such
moves have been relatively rare, in part because law
faculties are small (the largest in the country has only 70
to 80 members). Yet over the last 10 years, there has been an
unprecedented migration to NYU from schools like Chicago,
Harvard, Michigan Pennsylvania, Stanford, Virginia, and Yale,
and NYU can now boast the most distinguished set or
``laterals'' of any law school.
Another element is its student body. For decades, NYU has
drawn strong students, but today the school attracts many of
the very best in the country. Today, by any objective
criteria-grade point averages, LSAT scores, the number of
graduate academic degrees earned, the languages spoken-NYU's
student body is among the three of four most selective in the
nation.
And then, too, there is NYU's remarkable record in
providing those students, as they graduate, with the most
coveted legal jobs. NYU's graduates long have dominated the
public service bar, but the dramatic development of the past
decade is that NYU has edged ahead of Harvard in providing
the greatest number of hires by the American Lawyer's 50
leading law firms.
The school's arrival at the top has been ratified in
perhaps the most brutal arena of them all: fund-raising. In
December 1998, NYU Law completed an extraordinary successful
five-year fund-raising campaign. Under the leadership of
Martin Payson ('61), the campaign's chairman; Board Chair
Martin Lipton ('55); and Vice-Chair Lester Pollack ('57), the
campaign has generated 45 gifts in excess of $1 million.
Eight have been in excess of $5 million, including gifts from
Alfred ('65) and Gail Engelberg, Jay ('71) and Gail Furman,
Rita ('59) and Gustave Hauser, LL.M. ('57), Jerome Kern ('60)
Dwight Opperman, Ingeborg and Ira Rennert, and the Wachtell,
Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm. It took NYU just three years
to reach its original five-year goal of $125 million, and it
easily surpassed its revised goal of $175 million. Only Yale
and Harvard law schools join NYU at this level.
Once I discovered these facts, the startling idea that NYU
Law School may be the best in the country--perhaps in the
world--began to grow on me. And I also realized that this
transformation was a riveting tale of ``from there to
here''--one of the most remarkable in education history. Here
it is in a nutshell.
[[Page S8397]]
A Historical Perspective
Fade in. Scene One. It is 1942. Arthur T. Vanderbilt
becomes dean of NYU Law School. Though already more than a
century old (it was founded in 1835) and boasting graduates
like Samuel J. Tilden, Elihu Root and Jacob Javits, NYU is
not an impressive place. Its facilities are limited to two
floor of an antiquated factory building in Greenwich Village.
It is a ``commuter school,'' drawing its students from the
New York metropolitan area. Justice Felix Frankfurter, in his
biography, described it as one of the worst schools in the
country.
But the visionary Vanderbilt sees the potential oak lurking
within the acorn. He sees NYU as a national and international
``center of the law.'' Many in the upper reaches of the
university see his dream as ``Vanderbilt's folly,'' but the
determined Vanderbilt, dedicated to the dream, presses on.
First, he begins to exploit the school's unique asset: its
Greenwich Village location in the legal, financial, cultural
and intellectual hub of the world, New York City.
Methodically, he plans for an expansion of the school's
physical plant. Soon he opens an attractive new classroom
building that the law school can call its own, and he follows
three years later, in 1955, with the school's first residence
hall.
Along the way, seeking to raise much-needed cash, the
dean's natural financial savvy intersects with luck, when he
purchases the C.F. Mueller Macaroni Company for the law
school. The company generates profits each year and gives the
school lasting security, for when the Mueller Company is sold
in 1977, it is worth more than 20 times the school's original
investment. Even after providing $40 million to the then-
financially pressed university, the law school realizes a
gain of nearly $80 million. And, in return for having shared
its profits with the university, the law school is granted a
degree of autonomy unprecedented in education. It will
henceforth do its own planning, and its decisions will be a
product of its dean, its faculty and its own independent
Board of Trustees.
Vanderbilt officially resigns in 1947 to become Chief
Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, but he continues to
play Pygmalion with the school until his death in 1957. He
adds significant new programs designed to give the school a
national reputation, he deploys a merit scholarship program
to attract the best students and he begins the process of
building a strong faculty. Still, though NYU Law School now
is a very good school, Vanderbilt's dream is not nearly
realized. Fade out.
Fade in Scene Two. It is the opening of the 1990 academic
year. We are seated in a hall at the law school, listening to
a distinguished leader of the faculty explain ``How NYU
became a Major Law School.'' The words spoken by Prof. Norman
Dorsen are appealing--for their modesty as well as for their
insight and depth. Dorsen, an eminent scholar and defender of
civil rights, has just retired as president of the American
Civil Liberties Union. Reading between the lines of his talk,
it is clear he is also a painfully honest man. It's not
difficult to sense that he is not entirely convinced that his
law school is altogether as eminent a place as some have
claimed it to be. Indeed, he tells his audience that recent
years have been a time of ``deceleration'' in NYU's ``steady
drive to the summit of American legal education, which seemed
inexorable a few years before.''
What does Dorsen mean? After all, in the quarter century
since Vanderbilt, the law school has added eight new
buildings, including two splendid residence halls and a
magnificent underground library--all state of the art. Its
student body has become more selective and much more diverse,
boasting students from a dozen countries. Its faculty now has
a core of highly regarded scholars and clinicians. Still, in
the previous five years, NYU has made only one addition to
its tenure track faculty, and two junior leading lights have
defected to Columbia (one of whom, David Leebron, would later
become Columbia's dean). There was the discomfiting prospect
that Columbia-- and other schools would persuade more faculty
members to move. This is not good, Dorsen says. It should
be NYU that is doing the luring and hiring. In his view,
the mood of contentment reigning at the law school, though
understandable, is potentially destructive.
On the positive side, Dorsen says, the school does have a
dynamic new dean, John Sexton. However, Sexton has been dean
only two years now, and it is too soon to assay his
potential. If Sexton succeeds in reigniting the law school's
``steady drive'' to the top, says Dorsen, it will be because
he has managed to replenish the school's slipping endowment,
to stanch the incipient hemorrhage of top scholars to other
law schools and galvanize NYU Law with a sense of mission.
Dorsen allows as how ``there is ample ground to hope'' this
all might happen, so that ``within a few years NYU will be
firmly established in fact and in the consciousness of the
profession and the public as being among the best in the
nation.'' Fade out.
Fade in. Scene Three. It is 1994. Richard Stewart, formerly
a chaired professor and associate dean at Harvard Law School
and recently assistant attorney general for the environment,
is sitting in John Sexton's office at NYU. Stewart is a
towering figure in law, widely recognized as the nation's
leading scholar in environmental and administrative law.
Harvard wants him back. Columbia, where Stewart's former
Harvard colleague and co-author is dean, has launched a major
effort to attract him. But Sexton thinks Stewart should come
to Washington Square--that he should become part of what he
calls ``the Enterprise,'' the group of NYU faculty who are
devoted to making the school the world's leading center of
the study of law.
The Enterprise is committed to several principles, Sexton
tells Stewart. It rejects the notion, prevalent in elite
schools, that faculty members are ``independent contractors''
teaching what they want to teach when they want to teach it,
and available to colleagues and students as much or as little
as they please. Instead, faculty in the Enterprise undertake
a reciprocal obligation to each other and to their students--
they pledge to be engaged with each other in a learning
community, reading drafts and being present for one another
in an ongoing conversation about law.
Sexton continues: ``The Enterprise rejects contentment in
favor of constant improvement and aspiration. The school
always should be asking: How can we become better? Members of
the Enterprise are willing, occasionally at least, to
subordinate personal interests to those of the collective.
They delight in having colleagues who challenge their ideas;
they are not afraid to be around people who are smarter than
they are.''
In making his case to Stewart, Sexton reaches back to a
phrase he first heard from the Jesuits: ``Most of all, the
Enterprise is committed to thinking constantly about the
ratio studiorum of the school: why do we do things the way we
do?'' The Enterprise, Sexton tells Stewart, is open to
everyone who wishes to join. It is the center of gravity of
NYU's faculty, and NYU's unique attraction.
``Count me in, Stewart says. Fade out.
Fade in. Scene four. It is 1998. We are seated in another
auditorium on the Washington Square campus of NYU, this time
listening to Dr. L. Jay Oliva expatiate to NYU alumni and
friends about his aspirations for the university he has
presided over since he succeeded John Brademas in 1992. Some
college presidents, he observes, especially those in the
Midwest, strive to make their institutions as good as their
football team. Others want it to be as fine as the music
conservatory or the medical school. Here at NYU, Oliva says
with a smile, ``I will be satisfied when I leave office if
the university matches the quality and the renown of its law
school.'' Fade out.
The New Dean
NYU Law's ascent unquestionably has been the product of
many factors. No. 1, just as Vanderbilt foresaw, is its
unique location. By the dawn of the '90's, as Professor
Richard Revesz notes, New York City itself was ``no longer a
minus'' in hiring faculty. The city had solved many of its
worst problems and was becoming attractive again, especially
to academics in two-career families (Revesz's wife, Vicki
Been, for instance is also professor at the law school). And
Greenwich Village is a particularly attractive part of the
city. However, to invoke ``other factors'' in accounting for
NYU's rise to the top of legal education while downplaying
the role of Dean John Sexton would be like trying to discuss
the right of judicial review without highlighting John
Marshall; it's talking ``Scopes'' while soft-pedaling Darrow.
It's To Kill A Mockingbird without Atticus Finch. When Norman
Redlich retired in 1988 and John Sexton, a member of the
Enterprise, was selected as his successor, the law school got
more than it expected. The dean calls himself ``a catalyst,
not the cause'' of the law school's arrival at the top, but
any measure and by all accounts, he is a catalyst nonpareil.
We owe to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus the familiar
observation that ``the fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one great thing.'' John Sexton, with his round
cheeks, his bright eyes, and bushy hair, resembles as well as
personifies the hedgehog. There is about Sexton a deep
intelligence and a grand sense of humor, but the one ``great
thing'' that he knows, and knows well, is single-minded
devotion to a team or institution.
Sexton came to teach at NYU in 1981, immediately following
a clerkship with Chief Justice Warren Burger, and was granted
tenure a mere three years later. He has run NYU Law School
for a decade now, and recently, happily signed on for another
term of five years. This alone is rare. Law schools these
days are desperate for deans because deans are desperate to
leave their posts. The average tenure of an American law dean
is fewer than four years. In the words of Chief Judge Harry
Edwards: ``John is a truly visionary dean, and if that
statement sounds like an oxymoron, it's because no one these
days thinks of law deans as visionary. They aren't thought to
hold a job that allows them to be visionary. Even if some
deans might want to do something special, the drudgery of
running a law school, especially of holding its factions
together, doesn't permit it. That's why deans turn over so
quickly.''
Sexton's personality is haimish-warm and embracing, your
quintessential ``good guy.'' John (as he urges everyone,
including his students, to call him) is disarmingly self-
effacing, gracious, ready and eager to brag about others, to
share credit even for things he has largely accomplished on
his own. He is above all eager to elicit people's counsel and
ideas, to involve them in his grand project of building up
the law school. Despite his Harvard J.D. and his Fordham
Ph.D. (in religion), he is profoundly non-elitist. A
[[Page S8398]]
Brooklynite who has kept (indeed cultivated) the accent, he
is absolutely comfortable with himself. Being around the
super-wealthy, the super-powerful, or the super-brilliant
neither fazes nor inhibits him in the least. And he's no
clothes-horse, either. There's often a slightly rumpled or
professorial air about him.
In short, this man is, in style and appearance, closer to a
New York ward heeler than, say, the cosmopolitan director of
the Metropolitan Museum. From his nasal Brooklynese to the
show-and-tell hands, from the wide-open, explosive laugh and
the rapid-fire banter to the sharing of jokes and stories,
Sexton is more like a New York mayor in the Ed Koch mold than
he is a white-shoe lawyer or John Houseman's Professor
Kingsfield in The Paper Chase. He can out--Rudin the Rudin
Brothers at boostering New York--he follows and knows the
Yankees, Knicks, Jets and Giants as few who aren't sports
journalists do, and he can (and will) tell you where to
find the best bagel in the five boroughs.
Among his skills is the ability to take the edge off
irritability or anger, to foster a sense of camaraderie among
the disparate group of people. And if he is no expert on
culture (and doesn't pretend to be), Sexton is yet
reminiscent of that mesmerizing czar of New York's not-for-
profit theater, the late Joseph Papp. For, like the founder
of the New York Shakespeare Festival, Sexton is a salesman,
par excellence, of his ``idea'' and institution. He knows
he's got the greatest thing in the world, and he's gonna
buttonhole, assault, cajole, and wear you down until you know
it too. And if at first you don't agree with him, that's
okay, he just hasn't done a good enough job of persuading
you--yet.
With his students and faculty, Sexton can be--everyone says
so--like a parish priest. As confidant and counselor, he is
peerless, inclined, as he himself puts it, to ``hear
confessions'' and impart advice, including no small amount of
moral exhortation, with a helpfulness and zeal that are both
legendary and unusual in the secular academy. ``John gets
this quizzical, almost surprised, look on his face while he's
listening to you,'' a student in his civil procedure course
said recently ``as if he's not sure he grasps all of what you
are saying--only he does. He seems bemused, but he isn't.
When he speaks, he talks quickly and a lot, but he's
helpful.'' A faculty colleague of Sexton's notes, ``John is
more expansive and discursive than articulate and concise,
but he can also be dead-on cogent when he needs to be. He'll
present all aspects of a subject, he'll summarize his
opponents' viewpoints with a fairness they cannot reproach,
but then, after all the praise and prefatory remarks and
analysis, he'll bear in for the kill. When he gets to his
point, watch out. It's not for nothing he was a national
debating champ and coach when he was younger.''
Though it is unusual for a law school dean to have a heavy
teaching load (many do no teaching), Sexton teaches--and
teaches. Indeed, he teaches more than many faculty who have
no administrative responsibilities. This fall he is teaching
three courses. ``I draw energy from the students,'' Sexton
says. ``Being with them reminds me why we do everything else.
They keep my eye on the ultimate goal. The students incarnate
our possibilities.'' Even outside of class, Sexton spends a
huge amount of time with students. His students congregate
for casual hours in his office on Monday evenings--and the
sessions often run past midnight. Students may raise any
topic they like, except the day's lecture. Asked how he can
spare so many hours for students and the classroom, Sexton
replies, ``I don't do the usual flag carrying, the external
things. If you go back over my eleven years as dean, you
could count on the fingers of one hand the number of black-
tie dinners and dais-sittings I've done. I avoid events where
I am introduced as a `comma person' __ you know, John Sexton,
comma, dean of __.' '' In short, if it isn't students, or
meetings, or intellectual events, Dean Sexton is at home with
his family.
Sexton at home differs little from Sexton in public. He is
a paterfamilias who readily assumes tasks and
responsibilities, from helping his daughter, Katie, 10, with
her homework, to working out a solution to his aging mother-
in-law's care needs. You wouldn't describe John as
``uxorious'' where his wife, Lisa Goldberg, is concerned
(she, like her husband, is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the
executive vice president of the Charles H. Revson
Foundation), but his devotion to her is such that the word
passes through your mind. Home and hearth mean a great deal
to John, and if ``family'' certainly starts with Lisa, Katie
and grown son Jed, an actor, and Jed's wife, Danielle, it
also includes others, for John and Lisa readily invite
additions to the mishpocha. He enjoys contributing--he almost
needs to contribute--to the sense of fulfillment and well-
being of those around him.
A hedgehog in his devotion to one great idea, Sexton also
is a hedgehog in the way he pursues it. The NYU Law dean
hasn't the chameleon's morphing talent, and only some of the
fox's canniness, but he is the exemplar of the persistent
sell. Unlike any other leading law dean, Sexton, in service
to his ideal, is not afraid to give himself away, to look
ridiculous, to give everyone he talks to his or her full
due--and maybe a little (actually, a lot) more--often at his
own expense. Sexton readily refers to himself as ``the P.T.
Barnum of legal education,'' and if the listener actually
goes away thinking ``that is truly what this guy is,'' that's
okay, as long as he or she has come to understand Sexton's
``great idea'' and agreed to serve it in some fashion.
In short, Sexton's is a personality that couldn't work for
a standard academic mandarin, someone with a brittle ego or
ticklish vanity. ``Being John Sexton'' requires too much
self-confidence and idealism--above all too much ease with
himself--for that. For only a man who knows who he is and who
believes in his ideal will so willingly run the risk of being
labeled ``Crusader Babbitt,'' as a critic of Sexton recently
described him.
Nowhere is Sexton's personality more, let's-say-it,
profitable to NYU than in his job as fund-raiser. Like it or
not--and no dean likes to admit it--fund-raising is the basis
of the top job. It is necessary, if not sufficient; in legal
terminology, it's dispositive--and it has been for decades.
Deans of professional schools hold a major trump card in
raising money: they represent the school that graduated (read
that, credentialed) the people to whom they are appealing.
The appeal to alumni turns first and last on self-interest:
helping us is helping yourself. This often works, but its
success speaks less to the talents of the fund-seeker than it
does to the motives of the potential donor.
John Sexton has raised a huge amount of money from NYU Law
School's graduates, but he has raised still more from other
sources. And he has done both less by appealing to self-
interest than by stimulating interest in and commitment to
ideas, and evoking collaboration in common causes and
projects.
Chief Judge Edwards, a graduate of Harvard says, ``John
adds value to his appeal because he is able to convince
people that they are an integral part of NYU's educational
enterprise. He shows them how the law school will be a better
place, better able to do its job, if they are a part of it,
in this or that specific way or program. He's the first dean
most people have met who has made a thought-out overture to
them for their personalities, their ideas, their ongoing
involvement, not just their money.''
West Publishing's Dwight Opperman is a graduate of Drake
University Law School, yet he has given millions of dollars
to NYU. As he puts it: `` I am approached all the time by
people with their hands out. There are so many worthy causes
and bright people to choose from. What John Sexton does
better than anybody else I've ever met is to show me how I
can be part of something original and interesting.''
Recently, for example, Opperman gave several hundred thousand
dollars so that NYU could host the forum with President
Clinton, Tony Blair and the other leaders.
Then, too, Sexton knows how to give even when he's not
getting. A few months ago, the Las Vegas entrepreneur James
Rogers was profiled in the New York Times for his record-
setting gift of $115 million to his alma mater, the
University of Arizona Law School. In the quest to make the
best use of this generosity, Rogers and Arizona's law school
dean, Joel Seligman, toured the country seeking advice from
leaders at the nation's top law schools. In the end, Rogers
asked Sexton to help them shape their plans. Why Sexton?
Rogers says that he was impressed by NYU Law's ``incredibly
swift'' rise in prominence: ``It already has bested Harvard
in some areas. It has great potential to get out in front and
stay in front.'' And he was no less emphatic about ``the
spirit of the place.'' ``The NYU people have high IQs and
strong opinions, but they're united in their focus on
being the best. They're a team.''
On short notice, Sexton recently flew to Tucson for a
weekend. In a series of intense discussions with Rogers,
Seligman and the Arizona faculty, they discussed options for
the University of Arizona Law School Foundation. (Sexton will
be one of the seven members of the board.) He asked nothing
for NYU, nor did he press Arizona to use NYU as a model. When
asked, ``What's in it for NYU?'' Sexton responded: ``That's
an irrelevant consideration. Generosity like Jim's commands
the sweat equity of everyone who cares about legal education
and the law.''
Rogers hasn't given a nickel to NYU Law school, but he's
impressed with its dean. ``John is generous and unself-
seeking. He's genuine in his feelings. You know he means what
he says. He isn't hidebound like a lot of academics can be.
Some of the deans are caught up in their traditions and
styles. But John is unfettered, in his imagination as much as
his personality. They're all smart, of course, but John's
inspiring, a true visionary. In his persuasiveness and energy
level, he's above everyone else. You're ready to go out and
conquer the world after a meeting with him.''
When pressed, Sexton had little to say about his role as
consigliere for Arizona, stressing only the generosity of
Rogers' gift and the care that has gone into allocating it.
As Judge Edwards puts it: ``One of John's best traits is how
self-effacing he is. He has no desire to come between someone
else and the credit they deserve, or don't deserve. But he
himself has big ideas that benefit people, and people know
it. He has galvanized them in their self-interest and made
them care.''
Making NYU Law School The Best It Can Be
When Sexton took over as dean in the fall of 1988, the NYU
law faculty already boasted more than a handful of men and
women of great talent and considerable achievement. A few,
such as Anthony Amsterdam, the criminal law scholar and
renowned death
[[Page S8399]]
penalty opponent, had national reputations. NYU's strengths
as a law school were quadri-polar: traditional meat and
potatoes (``booklarnin' '') curricula, clinical (practical)
education, a developing cadre devoted to an interdisciplinary
approach and a tradition of supplying legal talent to the
public sector. In all these areas, the past decade has seen
the law school advance both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The biggest advance has been the growth of its faculty.
From the beginning of his tenure, Sexton told all who would
listen that the key to making NYU the finest law school it
could be would be using the faculty already at the school and
the special notion of professional education articulated by
the Enterprise to attract ever more outstanding scholar-
teachers.
Since then, NYU's ability to attract brilliant lateral
appointments has become legendary. In the last decade, the
school snapped up nearly a score of celebrated scholars--
names like Barry Adler (formerly of Virginia); Stephen Holmes
(formerly of Chicago); Benedict Kingsbury (formerly of Duke);
Larry Kramer (formerly of Michigan); Geoffrey Miller
(formerly of Chicago); Daniel Shaviro (formerly of Chicago)
Michael Schill (formerly of Pennsylvania); and Richard
Stewart (formerly of Harvard). Moreover, NYU has made a
conscious decision not to use outsized salaries to attract
these top scholars--in other words, not to enter into the
academic equivalent of what the sports world calls free
agency. Instead, as Sexton puts it: ``We seek to make
ourselves irresistibly attractive to the people for whom we
are right. If you want the benefits of the kind of reciprocal
community the Enterprise has created, and if you are willing
to undertake the obligations associated with that community,
we want you, and we can offer you exactly what you want.''
And let there be no doubt that the degree and kind of
intellectual heat and light generated at NYU is doubtless a
draw to faculty and students alike. A weekly bulletin informs
the reader of an astonishing number of events, lectures, and
meetings, usually animated by a vast array of eminent guests.
Supreme Court Justices are regular visitors to NYU, as are
their equivalents from foreign lands. So are leading
corporate, labor, political and cultural leaders from the
United States and abroad. As one faculty member put it:
``Each week, there are two or three events here, any one of
which would be the major intellectual event at most other
schools.''
A visiting professor summarized his recent year at NYU this
way: ``I've spent time at most of the leading law schools;
simply put, none has the level of intellectual activity I
found here.'' Another said, ``Before I spent a semester here,
I knew that NYU's faculty was among the very best in the
country. What I didn't know was how much interaction there
was among the faculty and students. I certainly didn't
anticipate the steady flow of the leading thinkers and
players in the law. It seems that everybody who is anybody in
law either is at NYU, is about to be at NYU, or has just been
at NYU.''
Part of the extraordinary intellectual vitality of NYU can
be captured in a word unfamiliar to an outsider--
``colloquia.'' A colloquium is a specific and rigorous
``meta-seminar'' designed to engage faculty and students in
demanding discourse at the most advanced level. Typically, a
student's formal classroom time in one of the ten colloquia
is divided between a session of several hours devoted to
grilling a leader in the field (the ``guest'' participant)
and an independent seminar session devoted to student work
related to the week's topic. The distinction between teacher
and student often dissolves in the colloquia, replaced by a
joint pursuit of advanced study not only of the law but--more
usually--of other disciplines as well. There are ten
colloquia ranging from traditional topics such as ``Legal
History,'' ``Constitutional Theory,'' and ``Tax Policy,'' to
the less expected ``Law and Society'' and Law, Philosophy and
Political Theory.'' In short, interdisciplinary work is not
only a priority, it is central--in no small part because the
law school has an unusual number of world-class scholars from
disciplines other than law--in fields ranging from economics,
to politics, to philosophy, to psychology, to sociology. In
fact, NYU Law School boasts one of the finest philosophy
``departments'' in the world, with Ronald Dworkin, Jurgen
Habermas, Liam Murphy, Thomas Nagel, David Richards and
Lawrence Sager all in residence. And Jerome Bruner, viewed by
many as the father of cognitive psychology, is also at the
law school.
The fact that Bruner is at NYU is itself a testament to
creative thinking. Over the psychologist's protests that he
``knew no law,'' the faculty brought him to NYU in 1992 to
help the faculty and students analyze and understand legal
cognition more profoundly. The a priori questions he studies,
and which now valuably inform the general awareness of
faculty and students not only at NYU but at other schools as
well, include: ``What does law presuppose about the function
of the mind? How does the human penchant for categorization
affect legal thinking? How do lawyers listen? Does stare
decisis (the strength of precedent) apply to all human
decision-making, not just legal?'' This type of ``meta''
question is routine at NYU Law.
The Global Law School Initiative
There is another factor in the remarkable story of NYU's
growth--a factor that has both helped to attract faculty and
generated an unparalleled intellectual activity: the
willingness to take risks. A common, if often rued,
characteristic of most elite schools is that they tend to be
conservative, risk-averse. As one dean candidly put it, ``We
change as slowly as an aircraft carrier turns.'' Such an
approach is not the approach of NYU Law School. As Sexton
puts it: ``We embrace the positive doctrine of original
sin. If we are not to be perfect in this life, we should
seize our imperfection as an opportunity always to
improve--to follow Martin Luther's advice to `sin boldly.'
'' This led the National Law Journal to say about NYU in
1995: ``NYU, already a powerhouse, has become the leader
in innovation among elite law schools.''
The best example of all is NYU's boldest gamble to date--
what will turn out, incontrovertibly, to be the most
extraordinary innovation of Sexton's tenure at the law
school--NYU's Global Law School Initiative.
In proposing the initiative six years ago, Sexton and
Norman Dorsen, the faculty member he calls the ``father'' of
this venture, precipitated a revolution in legal education.
Hailed today by many as the most significant step since
Langdell developed the case method, the initiative is
predicated on an inevitability of the next century, that the
world will become smaller and increasingly interdependent.
The importance of the rule of law as the basis of economic
interdependence and the foundation of national and
international human rights will become self-evident. As
governments adopt legal systems based on the rule of law,
more and more people will experience political and economic
justice for the first time.
Taking globalization seriously means understanding that
there are no significant legal or social problems today that
are purely domestic--from labor standards and NAFTA to
intellectual property and trade, to the impact of foreign
creditors on domestic monetary policy.
NYU's faculty has long been interested in international
issues, and its curriculum has reflected this. Its student
body, composed of a high proportion of foreign students, have
always been able to choose from array of traditional,
clinical, and interdisciplinary courses offered by scholars
in public and private international law, comparative law,
international taxation and jurisprudence. But the Global Law
School initiative is something different--subtler, grander,
more challenging. It is not a program for the study of
international or comparative law, it is about bringing a
global perspective to every aspect of the study of law,
leading to a new way of seeing and understanding not only
law, but the world. Its central premise is that there is
value in viewing and reviewing law and society from new
vantage points; the more you widen the cultural-conceptual
circle of discussants, the more the discussion widens, and
the more likely it is that the overall fund of good ideas
will grow.
Of the four major components of the Global Law School, the
most important is the Global Law Faculty, a score of leading
legal scholars and practitioners from around the world, who,
though they retain their ``day jobs,'' agree to come to
Washington Square for a minimum of two months a year. The
Global Faculty, which supplements and complements NYU's
extraordinary American Faculty, represents six continents and
eighteen nations and boasts the names of many of the planet's
leading scholars: Sir John Baker, the eminent Cambridge
University law historian and dean of Cambridge's law faculty;
Uprendra Baxi, vice chancellor of New Delhi University;
Menachem Elon, retired deputy president of the Supreme Court
of Israel; and Hisashi Owada, permanent representative of
Japan to the United Nations, are just a few. These men and
women are not ``visiting professors'' in the usual sense.
They come in far greater numbers, are in residence longer,
and they maintain a continuing relationship with NYU after
they have returned to their home countries. Most return for
second and third teaching and research stints at NYU. In
Dorsen's words, ``They are part of us, and we of them.''
Fifty years ago, Arthur T. Vanderbilt saw the value of
attracting students from abroad to the school, and he
instituted a special program to bring experienced foreign
lawyers to the school for a year of study. The Global Law
School initiative takes Vanderbilt's notion to a new level.
Stimulated in part by a $5 million gift from Rita and Gustave
Hauser, NYU established what is now the world's premier legal
scholarship program for foreign students, the Hauser Scholars
Program. (Sir Robert Jennings, immediate past president of
the World Court, has called it ``the Rhodes Scholarship of
Law.'') Each year, a committee chaired by the president of
the World Court chooses the finest young lawyers in the world
and brings them to NYU. This has led others to come as well,
and the result has been the creation of the most diverse
student body anywhere: This academic year, there are more
than 300 full-time students studying at the law school who
are citizens of foreign countries; they come from almost
three dozen countries and six continents.
Not surprisingly, the curriculum that flows from the Global
Law School initiative goes well beyond supplementing a
traditional American legal education with doses of
comparative and international law. Mere supplementation would
only reinforce the notion that foreign law is something
peripheral, lurking on the outskirts of what a ``good
American lawyer'' needs to know to
[[Page S8400]]
ply his trade. Instead, NYU has forged a pedagogy and
curriculum that give every student a deeper understanding of
the global dimension of the life of a modern lawyer. Members
of the Global Faculty teach a wide array of courses,
including ``basic'' courses like dispute resolution, property
or tax law, bringing new and critical thinking to fields that
have long needed them.
The foreign students, too, bring different and important
perspectives. As one American professor told me: ``I was
teaching Roe v. Wade (the abortion case) as usual when a
female Chinese student asked me to use Justice Blackmun's
decision to assess her government's policy which had required
her to have an abortion. An American student never would have
asked that wonderful question.''
The Global School initiative has led NYU to create a broad
range of inter-university agreements, institutes and centers
designed to advance the global perspective. And the school's
success with the program has generated conferences, forums
and special events that have brought the world to NYU--and
NYU to the world's attention. So, for example, a conference
on the enforcement ability in domestic courts of judgments
rendered by the array of new international tribunals brought
three U.S. Supreme Court justices to NYU, where they spent
three days in conversation with counterparts from around the
world--using a set of papers prepared and presented by
students as springboards for discussion. A conference on
constitutional adjudication attracted U.S. Supreme Court
Justices to Washington Square for four days of talks with
twelve justices from the Constitutional Courts of Germany,
Italy, and Russia.
And then there was last fall's day-long forum,
``Strengthening Democracy in the Global Economy: An Opening
Dialogue.'' There never had been an event like it at any
university. The cast of participants was overwhelming. In a
room packed with NYU's faculty and students, and before a
world wide television and media audience (Ten networks were
present and 350 journalists were credentialed), leaders
grappled in genuine conversation with the need for new
political and economic answers in a globalized world. When
the capstone panel of the day (a two-hour reflection on the
earlier discussions moderated by Dean Sexton and featuring
the four heads of state) concluded with a look forward to the
continuation of the dialogue under the auspices of the law
school, it was clear that NYU Law had become the venue for a
global conversation about law.
Successfully incorporating what Dorsen calls ``the
inevitable but only faintly understood globalization of law''
is obviously a long-term proposition. So also is effecting
the transformation of perspective that will change legal
education. And everyone at NYU acknowledges that the Global
Law School initiative faces challenges that will not be met
easily--for instance, the difficulty of truly integrating
foreign and American law students and faculty, day to day.
Still, as First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton put it, it is
now clear that ``NYU Law School has arrived at a place
where the rest of legal education will strive to be five
or ten years from now.''
A Community With Heart . . .
When you ask Dorsen what he believes ``excellence'' in
legal education is all about, the Stokes professor is quick
to explain that, for him, it goes well beyond intellectual
quality and attainment. The two additional factors Dorsen
deems necessary--``and which have epitomized NYU Law School
for me''--are ``variety and heart.'' ``Variety'' of course
refers to NYU's diversity, not only in gender and the social,
ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds of its students and
teachers, but also in the teaching styles and scholarly
traditions, educational activities, programs, institutes, and
opportunities; and, far from least, the array of legal and
public vocations elected by graduates, far from all of whom
go into corporate law.
As to ``heart,'' this is ``not a simple concept,'' Dorsen
concedes, for all that it is absolutely pivotal. ``Heart'' is
what it all rests on and serves--reputation, quality,
prestige, success. It refers to judgement, morality, higher
goals, and to the sense of community that comes with being
united in a common pursuit. ``Heart'' is a fragile thing,
``constantly at risk'' in a world where ``intense
preoccupation'' with individual pursuits easily drives out
concern for public welfare and community values.
If you press members of the NYU Law School on this topic,
``heart'' (or some similar word or phrase) is what they
answer to the questions of why they love the place and why it
has fared so well. The challenge, beyond attracting faculty
stars, the best students and terrific administrators, is to
create an environment that is not only intellectually
fulfilling but also socially congenial and inspiring to
everyone. This is perhaps Sexton's most important
contribution to NYU. With him as its catalytic stimulus, the
law school has moved from the ``independent contractor''
model of an academic institution--with its competition and
factionalism--to being what the dean, with his Jesuit
education, loves to call ``a communitas'' of mutual
collaboration and commitment.
As I looked at NYU Law 18 months after the publication of
his profile of its dean, I again asked James Traub the
question the New York Times had asked in the headline to his
piece: ``Is NYU's law school challenging Harvard's as the
nation's best?'' He replied: ``Where NYU might beat even
Harvard or Yale is as a place to be. NYU is ahead of
everybody as a happy place. Law professors are notoriously
critical and skeptical. They have trouble feeling part of any
institution. You can feel the unease and the disarray at many
of the best law schools in the country, but not at NYU.''
As Richard Revesz, one of NYU's brightest young stars,
says: ``The possibilities in this place come together
remarkably, combining individual freedom with the dean's
sense of community. We have a pluralistic, not a homogeneous,
community at NYU.'' His colleague, Stephen Holmes, a leading
political theorist, formerly of the University of Chicago,
puts it a little differently: ``There is a poisonousness in
academic life, and a degree of backbiting and professorial
whining that are absent here. John's genius is creating
opportunities for the faculty that take the edge of this
tendency. He can take energies that can easily turn into
mutual recrimination, energies that have done so in other
places, and manage to make them productive. NYU is the least
bitter institution I've worked at. There's a mutuality and
purposiveness here. The administration makes it possible for
each of us to do his or her best work without obsessing over
our neighbor's advantage. No one seems to get a stomachache
here because someone else is doing well.''
When asked if that is due to a sense of community, Holmes
says he doesn't especially like that word, but he affirms
that ``discussion at the law school mainly goes on, as in the
colloquia, in a public setting. This is a very public-minded
institution. It isn't dominated by the corridor setting and
the gossip that that setting usually creates.''
. . . And A Dean With Soul
At the drop of a very small pin, Sexton will expand warmly
upon his current plans for the law school: to bring the
global initiative to full fruition, to develop a curriculum
for the 21st century that ``addresses a broader range of the
cognitive talents we in the law use in working with the
law,'' to build the finest center in the world for research
and teaching about law in order to ensure that law and
lawyers are used to make our world better.
And--another bold idea--to make NYU tuition free. This last
dream, especially close to his heart these days, would be
funded partly by building the law school's endowment so that
it generates more income and partly by a structured plan that
will see NYU graduates who go into corporate law contributing
back to the law school the tuition they never had to pay when
they were law students. As president of the Association of
American Law Schools--legal education's oldest and most
distinguished collectivity--Sexton was remorseless in
advocating his idea that practicing lawyers should contribute
1% of their income over $50,000 to the law school from which
they graduated. ``It is imperative,'' Sexton says, ``to
reduce the enormous debt our graduates incur to pay for their
education.'' (It is not unusual for a student to graduate
with $120,000 in law-school-related debt.) He continues: ``If
we do not reduce their debt, they will be forced to choose
income over service.''
Where did all these ideas come from? When asked, Sexton
will remind you of Arthur Vanderbilt's hopes, of the dreams
of ``the Enterprise,'' and of Dorsen's expansive notion of
``heart.'' But, too, he speaks of ``the Tocquevillian ideal
of the law,'' infusing that ideal with his own insights, as
he did in a recent ``President's column'' in the newsletter
of the Association of American Law Schools:
``From the beginning America has been a society based on
law and forged by lawyers; for us, the law has been the great
arbiter and the principal means by which we have been able to
knit one nation out of a people whose dominant characteristic
always has been our diversity. Just as the law has been the
means for founding, defining, preserving, reforming and
democratizing a united America, America's lawyers have been
charged with setting the nation's values. Unlike other
countries, America has no unifying religion or ethnicity; our
principle of unification is law.''
Lest this be heard as after-dinner boiler plate, or, worse,
an attempt to promote self-satisfaction in his audience,
Sexton is quick to point to the historical irony that the
American Constitution is becoming a model for nations that
have never known the rule of law, precisely at a time ``when
we in America are becoming more humble about how much we
don't know, how much we haven't managed to get right.''
Sexton's high-minded idealism, some have noted, is suffused
and informed by an Irish-Catholic religiousness lurking just
below the surface of his energy, as between the words of all
his speeches. It often leads him to enunciate strange
definitions in the tin ears of a secular age. ``Legal
research,'' in the Sextonian reading, becomes ``serious
thinking about the `ought' of the law, not the parody evoked
by the phrase `yet another law review article.' '' Where most
are content to speak of law as a profession, Sexton lovingly
dubs it ``a vocation, a deep calling, that governs or ought
to govern our professional lives.''
It is in this elucidation of ideals and the moral
exhortation with which they are pressed home that Sexton is
most himself. The single-mindedness of his dedication to his
cause permits him more leeway than others allow themselves.
As Chief Judge Harry Edwards puts it, ``People with true
values and beliefs have a big head start in any
conversation.'' The school's former Board chair,
[[Page S8401]]
Martin Lipton, who recently became chair of the university's
Board, adds, ``Anyone who knows or works with John soon
realizes that he is a man not only of vision but of
complexity, a man whose drive toward meaning is not
encompassed or summed up by the standard references of the
academic marketplace: prestige, rankings, or VIPs.''
A friend of the Sexton family, the writer and literary
scholar Peter Pitzele, recalling John's original vocation as
a professor of religion, puts it another way: ``I would set
John in the historic context of Americans who have worked to
create an institution--a corporate body--that in some strange
way is, or seeks to be, sanctified. I think it is this drive
to sacralize that really animates what John is doing.'' He
adds, ``Though genius and genial are etymologically related,
in life they rarely are. It seems to me that--rare though the
combination is--John is both.''
Another friend of Sexton's, and his colleague to boot,
Richard Revesz recalls one of the biggest bestsellers of the
early 1980s, a novel written by a professor of his at
Princeton. In The Vicar of Christ, Walter Murphy tells the
story of an American law school dean who ends up as Pope.
Notes Revesz, with a smile, ``Every time John starts out a
conversation saying to me, `Let me be your pastor, Ricky,
tell me what's on your mind,' I think to myself of Murphy's
novel and I wonder . . .''
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