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Candidates for law school dean to visit campus
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
Two of the four finalists for the position of dean of the UB Law School will visit campus within the next several days to meet with members of the UB and local legal communities.
The four finalists are Marion Crain, Paul Eaton Professor of Law and director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity in the School of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Margaret Raymond, professor of law, University of Iowa College of Law; Bruce Smith, professor and co-director of the Illinois Legal History Program in the College of Law, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Leon Trakman, immediate past dean and professor in the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Smith will visit campus tomorrow; Raymond will visit on Monday. Trakman made his on-campus visit on Friday, while Crain was here on Monday.
While on campus, the candidates are meeting with law faculty, senior staff, and students; alumni and other leaders of the legal community; and with senior university leaders, said Guyora Binder, UB Distinguished Professor of Law and chair of the Law School Dean Search Committee. There also are open sessions scheduled with each candidate for members of the general university community, and all interested individuals are welcome and encouraged to attend, Binder added.
The open sessions with Smith and Raymond will be held from 3-3:30 p.m. in 509 O'Brian Hall, North Campus, tomorrow and Monday, respectively.
"We have an opportunity, through this search, to recruit an outstanding new dean to the UB Law School, the university and the Buffalo Niagara region. The search committee appreciates the interest and participation of the university community in this recruitment process," he said.
Click here for more information about the candidates. Detailed and confidential feedback about candidates may be sent to the search committee at law-dean@vpsa.buffalo.edu.
Crain joined the UNC law school faculty in 1995. She previously held law faculty positions at the University of Toledo and West Virginia University, and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, George Washington University and the University of Alabama.
She was named deputy director in 2005, and director in 2006 of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, the nonpartisan, multidisciplinary center founded by Sen. John Edwards in 2005 to bring together scholars, policy-makers, lawyers, community leaders and students to further research and policy-making on issues related to poverty, work and opportunity.
She teaches labor law, employment law, family law and feminist legal theory, and her scholarly interests focus on the relationship between gender, work and class status, with an emphasis on collective action.
Crain has authored two textbooks: "Labor Relations Law: Cases and Materials" and "Work Law: Cases and Materials," both published by Lexis Law Publishing. She also is the author or co-author of more than 25 law review articles and two book chapters, and co-edited, with Edwards and UNC sociologist Arne Kalleberg, "Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream" (The New Press, 2007).
She earned a bachelor's degree in social work from Cornell University and a law degree from the UCLA School of Law.
Raymond, a former clerk to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, has been a member of the law faculty at the University of Iowa since 1995. She also has worked in private practice as a commercial litigator and as a criminal defense attorney. Her scholarly publications focus on constitutional criminal procedure, criminal law and legal ethics.
Raymond is heavily involved in community, professional and university service. She has been a member of the Iowa Rules of Professional Conduct Monitoring Committee, and served on its drafting committee from 2000-02. She also was a founding member of the Iowa City Police Citizens Review Board. She was a member of the University of Iowa Faculty Senate from 1997-2005, serving as president from 2003-04. She has chaired the university-wide budget committee, as well as an ad hoc committee appointed in 2002 by the university president to investigate the institution's response to sexual assault allegations against a prominent student-athlete.
She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Carleton College and a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review and received the John Ordronaux Prize, awarded to the student who ranked first in the graduating class.
Smith, who joined the Illinois faculty in 2001, teaches and conducts research in the fields of legal history, criminal procedure, intellectual property, Internet law and property. His scholarship focuses on the history of Anglo-American criminal justice administration in the 18th and 19th centuries. He currently is working on two book manuscripts: "Summary Justice: Magistrates, Crime and the Law in London and the Urban Atlantic World, 1760-1860" and "History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions."
In addition to his expertise in legal history, Smith is an authority on intellectual property law. He practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., from 1996 to 2001, primarily in the field of patent and trademark litigation. He currently serves as faculty editor of the Journal of Law, Technology & Policy and teaches in the International and Comparative Intellectual Property Summer Program, co-sponsored by the College of Law, St. Peter's College of Oxford University, and the University of Victoria (Canada).
Smith received a B.A. in history, summa cum laude, from Williams College and a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Cambridge. He received a J.D. and Ph.D. from Yale, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, a Legal History Fellow and senior editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Trakman joined the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, as dean and professor of law in 2002 after 25 years on the law faculty at the Dalhousie Law School, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has served as a visiting faculty member at McGill University, Tulane Law School, the University of Capetown, the University of Wisconsin Law School and the University of California, Davis.
A prolific scholar, Trakman has authored five books and more than 100 articles and papers on education reform, dispute resolution, contract law and constitutional rights.
An active international commercial arbitrator and mediator, he is on the boards of a variety of international arbitration and mediation associations, and has served as a constitutional and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) consultant to numerous international organizations, governments, and bar and business associations.
He is co-editor-in-chief of Doing Business in Mexico and a member of the board of editors of Constitutional Review and of the international editorial board of South African Law Review.
He earned bachelor of law and bachelor of commerce degrees from the University of Cape Town and master's and doctoral degrees in law from Harvard Law School.