February 2016

By: Bill Schulz

As the Paul M. Hebert Law Center’s academic year fades from fall into spring, its direction and leadership for presumably the next several years is now being determined.  Specifically, a new administrative head of the Law Center will be appointed before the end of the spring semester.  The deanship is a new position created in the wake of the campus reorganization that saw the Law Center merged back into the main campus; it had been an autonomous institution with its own chancellor until 2015.

The new dean will face a number of challenges immediately upon assuming office.  First, the ongoing budget crises that have plagued Louisiana higher education for the past several years will continue to affect the Law Center, albeit indirectly as a result of any cuts to the Louisiana State University system’s budget.  Second, the new dean will need to grapple with recent faculty resolutions regarding diversity matters.  Finally, the overall direction of the Law Center and its educational program looms large, as the civil and comparative law portion of the law degree becomes optional, and the balance between producing practice-ready attorneys trained by experienced practitioners and legal researchers trained by highly skilled scholars must be reset.  Related to this last issue is the need to maintain a relatively high first time bar passage rate and exceptionally high employment figures for recent graduates. (more…)