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| D E A N ' S P A G E S |
June 2001
Dear Chicago-Kent alumna/us:
The past academic year was enriching and rewarding for Chicago-Kent. With this letter I’d like to share with you news of significant developments and events from our fall and spring semesters.
The fall semester began on a high note with the arrival of ten new Chicago-Kent Honors Scholars. With undergraduate degrees from schools such as Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Chicago and University of International Relations in Bejing, these first-year students came to us with superb academic credentials and impressive records of leadership in their schools and communities.
As a group, their median LSAT score was in the 98th percentile of national test takers. Each has received a full-tuition scholarship and works closely with a faculty mentor to develop legal research and scholarship in his or her sphere of interest. The entire group participates in special honors seminars, led by Associate Dean Krent and me, focusing on new frontiers in the legal system.
Turning to our practical skills curriculum, I am delighted to report on a banner year for Chicago-Kent’s moot court and trial advocacy contenders. The team of Pamela Quigley and Max Stein was the regional championship team and a national octofinalist team in the National Moot Court Competition, while the team of Misti Floyd and Degee Wilhelm took the award for best brief in the Federal Bar Association Thurgood Marshall Moot Court Competition. Andrea Ricker Wolfson won the award for best oralist in the Chicago Bar Association Moot Court Competition, and Barrett Rubens won the award for fifth place oralist in the ABA National Appelate Advocacy Competition.
On the trial advocacy front, two Chicago-Kent teams won the Midwest regional championship in the National Trial Advocacy Competition. Each swept undefeated through a 25-team field, ranking first and second in total points for the competition. The team of Darby Carley and Tracy Ekl defeated teams from Northwestern, Loyola, John Marshall and Marquette. The team of Alissa Pazmino, Dorislee Jackson and Bethany Schols defeated Notre Dame, Indiana University, Indiana University at Indianapolis, and Loyola, then went on to become quarterfinalists at the national finals in Dallas.
A third team from Chicago-Kent won the Chicago Regional ATLA Competition, sponsored by the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. Congratulations to the winning team of Jeff Gardner, Jaime Voigt, Jason Moyer and Michael Shinsky. And congratulations to all of our moot court and trial advocacy contenders and to their outstanding faculty and alumnae/i coaches.
Two years ago the Chicago-Kent faculty and I, with support from President Collens and the IIT trustees, adopted a strategy to ensure continued improvement in student quality despite dramatic declines in the nationwide pool of applicants to law schools. This strategy has four components. The first is the Honors Scholar Program, which had begun in the fall of 1998. The second was a downsizing of the entering class in the day division from nearly 300 to 210. (The evening division remains the same size.) The third was a tightening of academic standards so that all of our graduates are well qualified to enter the profession. The fourth was stronger guidance for students regarding curricular selections.
I am pleased to report that all four measures are producing good results. After implementing the first year of the downsizing program, we boosted our median LSAT score by two full points, lifting us from just above the 50th percentile to nearly the 65th percentile among LSAT takers nationwide. We also dramatically improved our selectivity, dropping from an acceptance rate of almost 67 percent to an acceptance rate of 44 percent.
As we continue to admit a smaller class in each of the next two years, we hope to improve statistical measures of student quality further. This student quality strategy is an essential part of a decades-long effort to improve the reputation of Chicago-Kent and thus the value of its degrees for past and future graduates.
During the spring semester, our program in legal research and writing underwent a change in leadership. In May we welcomed professors Mary Rose Strubbe and Susan Adams, both respected members of our legal writing faculty, as the program’s new director and deputy director after the departure of Professor Molly Lien, who ably directed the program for eight years. Many of you read the newspaper accounts of this transition and the difficult issues that surrounded it. With this letter you will find copies of a statement I issued immediately following those accounts as well as a letter written by 17 members of our faculty and published in late May in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.
I cannot overemphasize the strength of Chicago-Kent’s commitment to sustaining and indeed enhancing its intensive program in legal research and writing, recognized throughout the nation for its standards of excellence. I have every confidence that professors Strubbe and Adams will carry forward Chicago-Kent’s tradition of pathbreaking teaching and research in this critical area of legal education.
Chicago-Kent continues to partner with other units of IIT in a variety of Interprofessional Projects that engage the talents of our students. One week after last November’s presidential election, students from law, engineering, design, public administration, business and psychology formed an IPRO task force to create new voting technologies that reduce the risks of voter confusion, protect ballot security, and make tabulations and recounts more efficient.
In a second interdisciplinary project, law students designed a Web site – www.electionmall.com – that aggregates available Web sites illuminating election laws within the fifty states. In addition to categorizing the laws by topic and annotating existing sites, the students wrote a “frequently asked questions” section to respond to recurring inquiries. Open to the public, the site ensures greater transparency for election laws. The team is now drafting ambitious plans for an “online campaign manager” that permits candidates to build their own Web sites, design their own calendars, access required election forms for electronic filing, consult a checklist and commentary for campaign strategy, and access a specially created donor base.
A third interprofessional project teamed Chicago-Kent students with Chicago’s Commissioner of Consumer Affairs to combat Internet fraud. The students helped investigate allegations of fraud in the auction and online contracts arenas. In addition, they built a Web site – www.wageronthemadness.com – designed to alert consumers to the dangers of online betting, and crafted plans for an additional site to warn consumers of the risks of “get rich quick” schemes on the Web.
Our scholarly faculty continues to sparkle in the classroom and to attract acclaim from around the world. Distinguished Professor Joan Steinman recently was selected to help prepare the next edition of the classic treatise on civil procedure, Wright and Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure. Faculty participating in our Institute for Law and the Humanities regularly dominate panels around the country and were featured prominently in the Chicago Humanities Festival. And of course, one of our most prominent stars, Professor Lori Andrews, continues to appear on national news programs and in national magazines as she helps Americans and others around the world understand the implications of breakthroughs in genetic science.
Professors Laurie Leader, Ed Kraus and Lori Andrews, with assistance from our Honor Scholars, Law Offices students, and Institute for Science, Law and Technology, are representing a group of families and advocacy groups in a case of first impression that challenges the defendants’ restrictive licensing of the gene patent for Canavan disease, a rare genetic disease that is most prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews. The case involves non-traditional applications of common law theories, including allegations that the researchers failed to obtain the informed consent of the plaintiff research subjects whose blood, tissue and urine samples and monetary contributions spearheaded research that led to the development of prenatal and carrier testing for Canavan disease. The plaintiffs want to ensure broad access to such testing and to foster research regarding the treatment and cure for this deadly disease.
In the international arena, Chicago-Kent has received two grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to host Global Chicago, a collaborative project designed to bolster Chicago’s strengths and identity as a global city. Already the project has launched a Web site showcasing more than 450 Chicago-based businesses and organizations – intellectual, cultural, social and economic – with global links. The Web site, at www.globalchicago.org, is receiving more than 1,400 visitors per day with visitors staying an average of 14 minutes.
In the past six months, Global Chicago has sponsored a series of seminars on topics ranging from the international land mines dilemma to current issues in Africa to the impact of globalization on culture, arts and politics in Chicago. A book on Chicago’s global character, now in the works, will address the city’s economic connections, workforce diversity, culture and politics, immigration, human rights activism, and humanitarian action.
In a related activity, the law school’s program in immigration law continues to reach out to Chicago communities. Working to beat the April 30 deadline imposed by the Legal Immigration and Family Equity Act, a contingent of our students fanned out across Chicago to help immigrants apply for legal status in the United States without having to return to their homelands and apply from there. Based at Chicago’s Midwest Immigration and Human Rights Centers and at a Loop law firm, students helped to greet scores of applicants, explain the law, translate birth certificates into English, and assist in filling out forms.
Last semester saw the establishment of our new Illinois Technology Center for Law and the Public Interest along with its first major initiative – a comprehensive plan to use the Internet to assist legal aid service programs in Illinois. With support from the Chicago Bar Foundation and the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois, students and faculty are creating a Web site for legal services staff replete with training materials, case law updates, and links to each other and to government services. The site will also provide those seeking assistance with pro se forms and instructions, basic information about common legal problems, and referrals to nonlegal resources, mediation programs, legal services staff and volunteer attorneys.
Meanwhile, a team of students from the law school and the Institute for Design has completed the research phase of “Access to Justice,” a technology-based project designed to assist pro se defendants in landlord/tenant, small claims and simple domestic relations matters. Working with the National Center for State Courts, students spent several months evaluating existing programs for pro se defendants in Illinois, Colorado, Delaware and California. They are now developing an Internet-based service that such programs can use to help pro se litigants identify and outline their claims, seek out community aid or alternative dispute resolution, navigate the courts, and collect judgments.
Looking back on the past year, I would like to thank the scores of Chicago-Kent alumnae/i who supported our students, programs and activities. As teachers, coaches, mentors, advisers and sources of financial support, you elevate the quality of our programs and the quality of our students’ professionalism and commitment to the legal profession. As always, I welcome your comments and questions.
Sincerely,
Henry H. Perritt, Jr.