National Jurist -September 2008 - (Page 19) DREXEL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW staff and students, including, from left, student Jerome Aquino, Dean Roger Dennis, Professor Susan Brooks and student Michelle Payne are celebrating their law school’s recent provisional accreditation from the ABA — granted less than 18 months after opening. law school. “We were looking at how medicine and engineering go together, and then how are they protected,” Oxholm said. “All that stuff had to do with law.” University administrators soon formed a committee, meeting for three months to debate, argue and project what the new law school would envision. Basing their curricula off of the famed MacCrate Report, administrators wanted to build a bridge between the practice and the academy. The report, published in 1992 by the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession, focused on the preparation of law students for the practice of law. Soon enough, the law school attracted 1,700 student applicants and more than 600 applications for teaching positions. “When the accreditors came, they found a law school that was staffed with faculty that was excited about the mission,” Oxholm said. Dean Roger Dennis can’t imagine any law school getting better support. “We just really had what we needed to do to build a law school,” he said. “We’ve been able to hire excellent people and were very mindful of our obligations to our students from day one.” Susan Brooks, professor and associate dean of experimental learning, said the school’s co-op approach makes students, on some level, better lawyers. “I think that legal clinics and clinical programs in law school have been for a long time a place in which there has been an appreciation of how one can teach a new practice,” she said. Through cooperative education, students supplement classroom study with professional experience. Approximately 100 employers have joined Drexel Law as co-op partners, including law firms, the courts, government and public-interest agencies. “For me it was a very unique and appealing opportunity to come in on the ground floor of a new law school,” Brooks said. “The challenge and opportunity of coming in and being able to be in this creative process is to be able to shape these programs and do so in an environment where there is a shared vision of having a goal of creating a law school. In a very real and genuine way that brings together theory and practice.” Risk takers Michelle Payne, a 2L, said she never really thought it was a risk to attend Drexel. “I did my research beforehand and knew about the president’s reputation and was very confident that there wasn’t going to be an accreditation problem,” she said. “To be a member of an inaugurating class “We’ve been able to hire excellent people and were very mindful of our obligations to our students from day one.” — Dean Roger Dennis is exciting, cool and fun. There are opportunities for us to shape the way the school is going to be.” Payne said she was first interested in attending Northeastern, but when she heard that Drexel was doing a co-op approach, there was no question that she was going to stay in her home state and attend Drexel. “I’m starting to find through this experience, it’s more about what I’m going to be able to do that’s in cohort with my own mission statement,” Payne said. Brooks said there is a certain amount of energy that goes into preparing for the accrediting bodies. Now that the law school has crossed that threshold, they can refine and develop the upper level curriculum. “We can now take experimental learning to the next level and build a very strong core into the curriculum,” Brooks said. Dean Dennis said the law school is still building the linkages between the medical and engineering school. They’ve also hired four new staff members to begin teaching in the fall. “We’re working on stuff that all other law schools are working on now that accreditation has been granted,” Dennis said. “Every month now we’re feeling more established than new.” Many political figures in the Philly area have had much to say about Drexel’s recent accreditation, but no one is more proud than the law school’s staff and students. “No matter what you read about Drexel and the law school right now, it’s never going to show you how good it actually is,” Payne said. “It’s just great, and I couldn’t imagine having a law school experience anywhere else.” PHOTO BY JARED CASTALDI September 2008 THE NATIONAL JURIST 19 http://fletcher.tufts.edu http://fletcher.tufts.edu
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.