October 2007

DEAN’S COLUMN

GENEROSITY HELPS BOYD SCHOOL OF LAW OVERCOME ADVERSITY

BY DEAN JOHN VALERY WHITE, BOYD SCHOOL OF LAW

Later this year, the Boyd School of Law will dedicate the newly constructed Thomas and Mack Moot Court Facility.  The state-of-the-art facility is yet another manifestation of the Thomas and Mack families’ tremendous support of education in Nevada, and of the Boyd School of Law in particular.  With it, we will be better able to offer skills and simulation courses for our students.  The facility will also be a great forum for the courts and the bar to interact with our students, improving the quality of legal education in the state.

Legal education is under great pressure today.  The core mission of teaching students has become more complicated even as the basis on which we increasingly judge law schools focuses less on that mission.  On the one hand, law schools are asked to prepare students to enter a rapidly changing profession, even if many sectors of the practice remain familiar to lawyers of generations past.  This is a context in which law schools cannot assume that students will acquire professional skills in their first years of practice or that they will be adequately mentored in the mores of the profession.  Consequently, legal education is being asked to provide more skills and more professional training.

Simultaneously, law schools have come to be judged largely by rankings produced by news magazines.  The rankings take little account for skills and professional training, or even teaching for that matter.  Instead, the rankings reflect the ability of schools to attract the strongest students and a well published faculty.  For public law schools, especially those in smaller states, the rankings drive law schools away from servicing their core constituency – their state’s bar and residents.  The tension created by these competing pressures pushes many law schools toward sacrificing major aspects of their mission. 

At the Boyd School of Law we have sought to transcend this tension, offering a great legal education while attracting the strongest students and most accomplished faculty we can recruit to Las Vegas.  This effort, one aimed at serving the citizens and bar of Nevada and becoming a nationally prominent law school, is possible only with the tremendous support of the community.  The generosity of the Thomas and Mack families, and of the many others who have supported us over the years,  has made it possible for the Boyd School of Law to become an important asset to the state while also becoming increasingly prominent in the national legal academy.