A Leading Law School Dean Announces His Departure

Dean Daniel Rodriguez was an innovator and reformer in legal education.

Dean Daniel Rodriguez (via Northwestern Law)

Big news in the world of legal education today: Daniel B. Rodriguez will step down as dean of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, effective at the end of this academic year. Dean Rodriguez will become Professor Rodriguez, rejoining the faculty and returning to his scholarship and teaching in administrative law, local government law, and state constitutional law.

This news is major not just because of the stature of Northwestern Law, one of the nation’s great law schools, but also because of the stature of Dean Rodriguez. Unlike many other deans of so-called “T14” law schools, who were content to keep their heads down and quietly cash tuition checks, Dean Rodriguez was an active and eloquent participant in debates over the value proposition of law school and the future of legal education.

My colleague Elie Mystal, who often found himself on the opposite side of those debates from Dean Rodriguez, had this to say about Rodriguez’s departure: “Dean Rodriguez was deeply committed to rethinking legal education. His departure as dean is a loss for the forces of reform within the legal academy.”

Dean Rodriguez didn’t just talk; he also acted. He raised epic amounts of money for Northwestern Law, culminating in an unprecedented $100 million gift from J.B. Pritzker and M.K. Pritzker, which led to the renaming of the law school. He wasn’t afraid to try new things, including accepting the GRE in lieu of the LSAT and launching the first two-year J.D. program at a top-tier law school. [UPDATE: The two-year program was actually launched under Dean Rodriguez’s predecessor, David Van Zandt.] Not all of the experiments worked — the accelerated J.D. program, for example, was discontinued in 2015 — but there’s no denying that Dean Rodriguez and Northwestern Law were committed to innovation in legal education.

Here at Above the Law, we congratulate Dean Rodriguez on six successful years of service — and express the hope (and confidence) that even when he’s Professor Rodriguez rather than Dean Rodriguez, he will remain engaged in the effort to improve American legal education.

(Flip to the next page to read the complete press release from Northwestern Law.)

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DBL square headshotDavid Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

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