Dear AALS Leadership Section Members,
It is certainly an interesting time to be researching, writing, and teaching in the law leadership area. The value of our academic endeavors as members of this section is clear. Whether our interests lie in work that touches on government, private enterprise, or individual rights and responsibilities, there is much to say and do.
The Section on Leadership exists to support and promote your work on leading in and through law. Our section’s presence on the AALS website includes information that may be valuable to your work. For example, our webpage can direct you to syllabi for leadership courses, upcoming and past (recorded) webinars hosted by the section, and prior editions of this newsletter. The section’s webpage also includes the names and contact information for members of the section leadership, which will be growing this year due to recently adopted bylaw changes that were approved by the AALS earlier this year. We hope you will contact any of us on matters of mutual interest and that you will let us know about other useful resources we can provide to section members.
The section has been active over the past nine months. It seems like forever ago now, but we had a fascinating and productive panel discussion at the 2025 AALS annual meeting in January on The Courageous Intersection of Leadership Education, Professional Responsibility, and Professional Identity Formation(recording available through the link). I had the privilege of moderating the discussion, which featured luminaries in law leadership, including Lee Fisher, Jerry Organ, Jennifer L. Rosato Perea, Aric Short, and Kellye Testy. There were so many great questions and comments from the floor! We did not have time to cover them all. I hope we will be able to get some of those engaged audience members to write newsletter columns for us or participate in (or even just suggest topics for) webinars in the coming months.
Early in March, the section hosted a webinar in which Elsbeth Magilton, a Lecturer and the Director of Externships at the University of Nebraska College of Law, shared her work in involving students with non-profit boards. You can find out more about the webinar, Law Students Learning to Lead through Non-Profit Board Service, by clicking on the link. A recording is also available from the linked page. Among other things, Elsbeth talks about the evolution of her non-profit leadership program, which in and of itself is an enlightening part of the webinar. I am grateful to my Tennessee Law colleague Beth Ford for organizing and moderating the discussion with Elsbeth.
At the end of March, the Wake Forest University School of Law and Program for Leadership and Character hosted the second major law leadership event during the 2024-25 academic year, a Leadership and Character in the Law Conference. Section executive committee member Kenneth Townsend and his team at Wake Forest Law organized a masterful program that involved section leadership and members as well as others. The section was a partner in that effort. The conference echoed and built on the discussion group that Kenneth and his colleague Ben Rigney organized for the 2025 AALS annual meeting on Developing Courageous Leaders: Trailblazing and Diverse Approaches to Leadership Education for Law Students.
And all of this followed on the October 2024 law leadership symposium hosted by the Institute for Professional Leadership at The University of Tennessee College of Law: Lighting the Way for 10 Years: A Symposium on Leadership in Law and Lawyering. I am again grateful to Beth Ford for leading the charge in organizing that event, which was also planned and executed in collaboration with the section. A special, peer-edited edition of the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy will be published later in the year that features work related to the symposium, which celebrated the Institute for Professional Leadership’s tenth anniversary.
I remain inspired by Tennessee Law’s commitment to leadership education. We have a new director of the Institute for Professional Leadership starting with us this summer, former Memphis Law dean Kate Schaffzin, and we are adding a new leadership course to the institute’s curriculum this fall, Lawyering and Social Change, being taught by our dean, Lonnie Brown. I likely will have more to say about all of that in future communications.
With this issue of the newsletter, the section says goodbye and thanks to our immediate past chair, Lee Fisher. Lee, the outgoing dean at the Cleveland State University College of Law and a former Ohio Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General, has been a wonderfully giving and welcoming leader for the section and for lawyer leadership education. However, he now moves on to new challenges outside legal education as he takes on the presidency at Baldwin Wallace University. We wish him well.
We also are grateful for the executive committee service of Martin Brinkley (dean at the University of North Carolina School of Law) and Kellye Testy (AALS executive director and CEO), both of whom rotated off the executive committee in January. Martin and I had some quality time together organizing a webinar for the section back in the summer of 2023 focusing on adjunct and full-time faculty collaborations on leadership curriculum and course design, and Kellye and I work in intersecting business law and leadership spaces and have known each other for almost 25 years, by my calculation (yet neither of us looks a day older somehow!). I will miss their fellowship on the executive committee, but they continue to be influential in law leadership through their institutional leadership in legal education.
AALS President Austen Parrish, Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the UC Irvine School of Law, has called us to embrace the following theme for his year in leading our profession: Impact. Excellence. Resilience. The Enduring Contributions of Legal Education. He desires to celebrate what all of us have been doing and continue to accomplish. In articulating his thoughts on this theme, he notes that law schools “have broadened their missions to try to equip the current generation with the skills and mindsets they need to succeed and live fulfilling lives.” Legal education’s embrace of leadership instruction and training has been a part of this expansion. We are planning a program for the 2026 AALS annual meeting consistent with President Parrish’s theme.
Leading—and leading change—is what we do as lawyers and law school instructors. Our students are the future of our profession. I appreciate all that all of you are doing to forward leadership education in law schools. In a time of rapid and dramatic institutional change, our leadership in the classroom, in our writing, and in our service to the profession and other communities is more important than ever. Please use the section as a resource in your work as we all navigate the evolving circumstances in which law is practiced and learned.
Best regards,
Joan