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Will Robert Post Be the Next Yale Law Dean?

Friday, June 12, 2009 2:06 PM - By David Lat

Robert Post professor Robert C Post.jpgHarvard Law School just announced its new dean, Martha Minow. Minow replaces Elena Kagan, who left HLS to become Solicitor General.

Meanwhile, HLS’s rival to the south, Yale Law School, has a vacant deanship of its own, also courtesy of the Obama Administration. After being nominated to serve as the Legal Adviser of the State Department, Harold Hongju Koh stepped down as dean. Professor Kate Stith is now serving as acting dean.

We called Dean Koh’s departure months before it happened, and now we’ll hazard another prediction: his successor as dean will be Robert Post, currently the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale. From an ATL tipster:

I have it from a pretty reliable source that the new YLS dean is going to be Robert Post. It seems really bizarre and unexpected…. but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

We’re not sure if we’d call it “bizarre and unexpected,” but it would be surprising. The trend in academia is to award leadership posts — university presidencies, law school deanships — to women and/or minorities. See, e.g., Elena Kagan, Martha Minow, and Drew Faust, at Harvard.

Several of the candidates floated for the YLS deanship — including Acting Dean Kate Stith, Professor Reva Siegel, and Professor Heather Gerken — would have advanced the goal of “diversity.” Robert Post is a white male, which doesn’t help when applying for promotion — especially in New Haven. If he were a firefighter, he’d be screwed.

Comments from more sources, who all agreed that Post will be picked, after the jump.

We reached out to several other sources at our alma mater, and they all concurred in the Post prediction. Said one: “Everyone seems to be saying it’s Post. That’s including a guy who said [the Acting Dean] would [be] Stith long before that was announced.”

A third tipster, who also agreed that the smart money is on Post, offered this explanation:

[Post] seems like the most logical choice of all the candidates. None of the names floated seems like a particularly skilled fundraiser [like Koh], but Post is second to none in identifying top scholars to bring in, knowing which fields to invest in, etc.

Fundraising is one of a dean’s most important duties, and the last three deans of Yale Law — Harold Koh, Anthony Kronman, and Judge Guido Calabresi — were all highly skilled in that department. But after a series of high-profile faculty departures, perhaps YLS has decided to refocus its energies on recruiting top-tier talent from other schools (as Kagan did for Harvard, where she assembled a dream team of legal luminaries during her wildly successful tenure).

A spokesperson for Yale Law School declined to comment; Professor Post did not respond to an email. We’ll keep you “Post”-ed.

Update (2:35 PM): Professor Post has responded: “Forgive me for not responding sooner—I’m in Paraguay at meetings and have only sporadic access to the internet. I’m afraid that I must respond with ‘no comment.’”

Update (3 PM): We consider this confirmed. We have it on reliable authority that Acting Dean Stith, while at the judicial conference of the Second Circuit — the court of her husband, Judge Jose Cabranes — revealed that Professor Post will be the new dean.

Update (5:20 PM): According to a Yale spokesperson, Dean Stith did not tell conference attendees that Robert Post would be the new dean.

Update (6/22/09): It’s official. See here.

Robert C. Post bio [Yale Law School]
At Yale Law, a faculty exodus or just a cycle? [Yale Daily News]
Firefighters Case: What Really Happened [National Journal]
“What Really Happened” in Ricci [Volokh Conspiracy]

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Posted in: Law School Deans, Yale Law School

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