[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15655-15660]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 15656]]

     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.


                        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

[[Page 15657]]

     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 
     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

[[Page 15658]]

     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 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

[[Page 15659]]

     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 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

[[Page 15660]]

     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, 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 . . .''

                          ____________________