The Class of 1971 recently celebrated its 50th reunion on September 9-11 with an in-person gathering on campus. We profiled three members of the class of 1971 who have worked in public service and asked them to share with us their proudest professional accomplishment, a favorite memory from SLS, and any advice for current 1L students.

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Jenik Radon, JD ’71, has been an enthusiastic supporter of Stanford Law School’s public interest students for several decades now. He has directly supervised our law students with public interest international law interests as well as placed them through his extensive contacts in Bhutan, Estonia, Namibia, and other emerging countries.

Among his many accomplishments, Radon co-founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee in 1980 to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion and notes, “I can proudly say we sparked the US to take action to help Afghanistan restore its freedom.” Radon is now happy, and personally proud, to have been able to assist in helping a number of Afghans, who supported US and allied countries with their Afghan projects, reach safety during the rushed evacuation of American troops from Afghanistan.

In 1990, together with Estonian friends, Radon retook the US Embassy from Komsomol (the Soviet Youth League) in Soviet-occupied Estonia and was the first to raise the US flag in Estonia since the Soviet invasion in 1940 and helped Estonia restore its independence. For his work in Estonia, he was awarded the Order of the Cross Terra Mariana, which was personally awarded by the President of Estonia, and the Cross of Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia.

During 1999-2004, Radon represented the republic of Georgia and took on BP in a major energy project and forced BP to employ the world’s highest environmental pipeline construction standards. For his dedicated and vigorous representation, he received Georgia’s highest civilian award, the Order of Honor, and was made an honorary citizen.

In 2006, he drafted the Nepalese interim or peace constitution which restored peace after a bloody 10-year civil war, stipulated that one-third of the parliamentarians are women, and granted citizenship to millions of stateless residents of Indian heritage.

Radon shared, “Stanford instilled in me the optimistic perspective to always to look forward, to the future, and focus on what the law should be, not on what it is, as many of my Stanford professors said. More than nuts and bolts, SLS instilled in me a spirit of can do.” He has taken those lessons to heart and spent much of his professional career using the law for positive social change around the world.

He also credits SLS with enabling him to meet Heidi Duerbeck, ’72. He stated, “[She] became my best friend, my life partner, my wife and the mother of our daughter, Kaara.” Duerbeck passed away in 1999 and Radon endowed a memorial fund at SLS to support law students who share her commitment to public interest international law.

Radon concluded, “I would give students the same advice my father gave to me: Do what you like; otherwise you have two jobs, to get up in the morning and to do well. If you do what you like, you only have one job, to do well. So live your dreams. Never lose your youthful idealism, your dreams, and your energy, which will sustain you for a lifetime and support you in the inevitable tough times to come. You can make a difference so be the change!”

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Margaret (“Marnie”) Ryan, JD ’71, shared, “At the age of 75, my proudest professional accomplishment is to be still standing and enjoying making a five-year plan for the two programs I run in Cambodia: the English Language Based Bachelor of Law at the Royal University of Law & Economics and the CLEW dorm for rural women law students.”

Ryan initially moved to Cambodia in 1995 thanks to Dede Donovan, JD ’70, who ran a USAID program in Cambodia and hired her to teach law for six months. But Ryan never left and is still there today, helping to train the next generation of Cambodian lawyers. When she first arrived in Cambodia, Ryan noticed that “there was a near total domination of the legal profession by foreign attorneys. This was all I needed to go into high gear. An anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle!”

Over the years, Ryan has built an enviable program. She pointed out that about 25% of her law students successfully earned scholarships to go overseas and earn LLM degrees from foreign institutions. Nearly everyone returned to practice in Cambodia.

She is particularly proud of an initiative she started shortly after 2006 to help women in extremely rural areas access a legal education. Ryan explained, “With the backing of four of our classmates, I started a dormitory for girls from very poor rural areas. This is really a joy and has become part of my life. It is in no sense a job. Poor rural girls did not use to go to law school. They have really distinguished themselves. We have graduated 60 girls and have another 40 in the pipeline.”

Ryan also wanted to highlight a younger alum: “Megan Karsh, JD ’09, came to work with me in 2010 and is fondly remembered by students and faculty. When she came it was touch and go as to how the programs could continue because we had no core funding. She has skills that I don’t and the survival of the programs is a credit to her.”

Ryan recalls one of her favorite SLS memories was a Christmas party in 1970 held at her home with her roommates, Barbara Fix, Betsy Leavy, Johnny Mitchell, and Denny Goldstein at their Richard Court residence. She noted, “It was fairly rowdy with the overflow crowd hanging out on the roof. Police came to the door which was answered by our esteemed professor William Baxter who calmly assured the police, ‘I am Professor Baxter of the Law School. Everything is under control.'”

Ryan advises students, “Have as much fun as you can now. If you attempt to confront the world as we find it, things could get rough.”

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Rick West, JD ’71 was the first Native lawyer to become a partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Based in their Washington, DC office, West explained, “It fulfilled my longtime aspiration to help secure the Constitutional and legal rights of contemporary Native communities and governments through representation before the United States Congress, federal executive departments, and federal, state, and tribal courts. The scope of representation was broad with respect to the tribes’ sovereign authority over their homelands, including civil and criminal jurisdiction, hunting and fishing rights, reserved water rights, and the practice of religious freedom among other prerogatives.”

After reaching that milestone, West spent nearly two decades serving as the founding director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He shared, “Having been raised in Oklahoma as a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, that appointment and position allowed me to return to a closely affiliated extension of my career as a Native rights attorney: namely, if I was devoted to protecting the legal rights and authorities of contemporary Native communities, a museum that recognized the power and authority of first-person Native voice in revising past and often erroneous historical narratives was only a short and valuable step away. The move also was not nearly so inexplicable as it might have seemed either, since my father was a widely recognized and acclaimed Native visual artist whose principal public venue was often a museum where he spent time with a young son in tow.”

West advises 1Ls, “Think and feel ‘big picture’ and be prospective, hopeful, and aspirational. I remember my Dad’s telling me early in life, in recounting Cheyenne history and experience. He said that we, indeed, had often been ‘victimized by the shadowlands of history,’ but that we should not respond as a ‘victim’: ‘It is self-defeating. Do something, and do it the best you can.'”

Among his many SLS memories, West says he’s thrilled he was able to share many of them with his wife. He had married Mary Beth, a member of the class of ’72, prior to his entering SLS. He noted, “She decided to ‘join me’ rather than endure the daily 3-4 hour commute back and forth to her job in the City. And the rest is her own distinguished history – primarily as a diplomat in the U.S. Department of State who held ambassadorial rank along the way.”