Lets start with some background stuff. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Queens and went to Stuyvesant High School—a born and bred New Yorker. I went to college and law school at Harvard, and then clerked here in New York for Judge Walter Mansfield on the Second Circuit.

strongDid you start your practice here?

After my clerkship I went to work for Legal Aid, and was in the civil division for seven years. While I was there I began to teach as an adjunct at NYU, and that’s what hooked me on academia. I started at Fordham in 1993, and became the Associate Dean of Academics for five years.

When I went to law school, I didn’t know what type of law I wanted to do. I never really saw myself as becoming a law professor. I found law school to be incredibly intellectually stimulating, did my clerkship and finished, and still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I knew I was interested in public policy questions and the intersection of law and public policy, but what exactly that meant for me, I wasn’t sure. My decision to go to Legal Aid was not something I had planned while in law school. I’m saying this for those students who are still undecided about their careers themselves. It’s great to know what you want to do, but life takes you in different directions—like teaching in a law school, or becoming a dean.

strongWas there an inspiration for getting into teaching?

Yes, first of all I loved working at Legal Aid. I had incredible colleagues that mentored me tremendously. I was in a great office, we did great cases. So I didn’t go into teaching because I wasn’t in any way ambivalent about practice, I loved practice. I started teaching as an adjunct, and I loved doing that. I loved working with the students, and I also liked that it allowed me to take a broader and different perspective on the same issues that I was working with.

strongWhat do you miss most about practice?

So much of practice and litigation, which is what I was doing, is viewed as adversarial, but most of it was actually sitting around with a bunch of people that I respected solving problems. Teaching and writing are more oriented to individual creativity. When I went into law school administration, I found it really engaged me again with solving problems creatively and working with people to solve difficult problems to reach a goal. Law school administration is more like practice than it is teaching.

strongTransitioning into your new job here at Cardozo, what did you do this summer, to prepare you for the new semester?

Well, I did have some time with my family, and got out of town. But since I have arrived here, I have been meeting with the administrators to get up to speed with what’s going on, learn what they have been doing. I will continue to do so through September. I have also been meeting with people from the Cardozo board, and that has been great. I am very interested in collecting information. For me it’s an education process. I knew that Cardozo was a remarkable school; I had watched it develop from my office fifty blocks away. I had talked to graduates and students, and heard about how happy people were here. Cardozo, really has incredible scholars, and a very collegial atmosphere, which I’m now learning about from the inside.

strongHas meeting with all the professors and alumni helped you form a vision of where you want to take the school now?

I know that I am coming into a school that is really fabulous, so I don’t see my goal as remaking it. I am focusing on communicating what is great about Cardozo to prospective students, the legal community, and donors. I will also look at those areas where we can improve. For me, it’s a matter of building on something that is already outstanding.

strongWhat are some areas that interest you?

One of the things that is a huge strength of Cardozo that has jumped out at me is the big emphasis on creativity and ideas. That’s unusual, and it’s something that comes from our faculty and affects our graduates when they go out into the world. Our graduates view themselves and are known to the legal community as out-of-the-box thinkers. I also want to focus on the fundamentals, which I think the school does well but it’s also something we can do better.

strongWhat do you mean by fundamentals?

Student services, how students access information, what additional assistance the school can provide, the range of course offerings. In my view it’s very important to focus on the student experience from the moment a student walks in our doors. I believe that law school is not really a three-year experience–it’s an entry into a profession. How people view their law school experience affects how they conduct themselves as lawyers and how they will view Cardozo once they graduate. It’s extremely important that people feel tied to the Cardozo community.

Something else I would like to focus on is extending our alumni network. There is huge enthusiasm out there among alumni. Over the past eight years Dean Rudenstine did a great job mobilizing that. So I’m very interested in building on that.

At Fordham, I have seen what a great alumni network can do for students in terms of jobs, and enriching their law school experience. The pieces are in place for Cardozo to have a similar system; we need to build the infrastructure for it.

strongA lot of 2Ls doing job searches right now are having difficulty. What advice do you have for them?

First of all I know it’s a very difficult time, and the legal job market is shifting in ways no one foresaw. The larger story is, the economy will come back and people will still need lawyers, so people in law school today, are going to go on and have great careers. What’s shifting is how students are going to enter the profession. Firms are rethinking how they do their hiring, and that is something we are going to be on top of. I am going to be in touch with firms to see first-hand how the process is changing and what employers will be looking for in the years to come.

My advice is that employers will always look for students with strong fundamental skills—strong writing and verbal skills, analytical skills. But they will also be looking for new lawyers that can hit the ground running, who are practical and can add value sooner rather than later. Therefore, activities that help hone skills to be of immediate use to firms will be valuable. Internships, public interest work, things that put students in real lawyer settings, moot court, the dispute resolution program, all of those will be helpful. I would say that it’s important that students think about how they are going to use their three years here to best position themselves.

strongIt’s clear that being top of the class makes OCI easier. Would you give any different advice for students who might find themselves in the middle of their class academically?

It’s true in all law schools that students at the top of the class have advantages in the job market. But that does not mean that other students cannot be just as successful. They certainly can be. Many of the leaders of the profession did not graduate at the top of their class.

My advice is to look broadly for jobs. Where you enter the profession, does not necessarily bear relation on where you will end up. So be flexible and be open-minded. Second, this school provides a remarkable range of opportunities and activities for students to distinguish themselves in different ways. A lot of employers don’t simply look at grades, they look at other things, e.g., clinics, the Dispute Resolution Society, moot court, internships. There is a whole world of employers out there who did not finish top of their class, and who will look at activities and experiences rather than grades when hiring. So distinguish yourself, and find what you click with. People learn in different w
ays and excel at different things. You need to find something that works for you. This sch

ool offers a wide range of activities for students to explore. Take advantage of them.

strongWith your background in public interest, how do you see the public interest community at Cardozo changing?

Public interest is very dear to my heart, and its one of the things that brought me to Cardozo. There is an enthusiasm for it at Cardozo, the clinical programs are wonderful, the summer stipend program here is really the largest that I know of. I am still learning and taking in information about it, so I don’t have a specific answer although my sense is that we need to pull all these great programs together and give it a real center of gravity.

strongLegal education today, what are its biggest weaknesses?

One thing that I think about is the academic program in the second and third years, and how to make it coherent without being rigid. I think those years should get more attention.

I am also interested in developing students’ skill sets in general, not the kind of nuts and bolts “how to” kind of skills training, but the analytical process of thinking through real world problems and solutions. A lawyer’s job is to identify and think about how to solve problems. Clients don’t come to you with labels—“I am a tort issue,” “I am a contracts issue.” There is a tendency for courses to present the issues as canned in some sort of way, but students need to be prepared to deal with how problems are presented in the real world and need to develop the habit of searching for creative solutions to problems, rather than focusing on a narrow set of outcomes. Students can be trained in this kind of approach and it is something that I believe a law school should provide.

strongWhat is your biggest non-legal accomplishment?

I have two children, a twelve year old and a fifteen year old, both boys. They are my biggest non-legal accomplishment. My wife is a lawyer who works for the New York State Attorney General’s office as head of the Environmental Bureau. I bike to work from my home in Park Slope, weather permitting. I take piano lessons, and I hope to continue that.

strongWhat is the most important case that you litigated?

emJiggetts v. Grinker/em, which I argued before the New York Court of Appeals. We received a favorable outcome which requires payment of rent assistance for some people who receive public assistance and whose rent is higher than the welfare grant. Another case is Stieberger v. Sullivan, a class action in the Southern District of New York. Our settlement in that case led the Social Security Administration to reopen and review many previously denied applications for Social Security benefits in New York.

strongFavorite Supreme Court Justice?

That’s easy: Benjamin Cardozo.

strongFavorite case?

emGoldberg v. Kelly/em [397 U.S. 254 (1970)]. In my mind, it shows how the law can adapt to deal with the realities that people face, rather than a formal set of categories. My work at Legal Aid is tremendously helpful to me in understanding the significance of Goldberg. Goldberg also speaks to issues that arise in many parts of the curriculum—civil procedure, property, constitutional law, and administrative law to name the obvious ones.

strongWill you be teaching a course this year?

I have taught Civil Procedure and Administrative Law, but won’t be teaching this year in order to focus on learning more about the school. I love teaching. I really like to teach arcane subjects because part of the challenge is showing students how arcane things can be critically important both to clients and to society. For instance, preclusion is something students often have a hard time understanding, but it is of fundamental importance to our system of litigation.