Kathleen M. Sullivan knows just one pace— flat out. That’s the way she spent the first 58 months of her tenure as Dean, and it’s sure to be the way she’ll finish the last two.

Kathleen M. Sullivan had been Stanford Law School Dean only a short time when she arranged to meet with an important alumnus at Palo Alto, California’s tony Spago restaurant. “She came in and was clearly under the weather,” recalled Gordon Davidson ’74 (BS ’70, MS ’71), Chairman of Fenwick & West LLP. But being sick wasn’t going to stop her from attending this dinner. The Class of 1974 was celebrating its 25-year reunion, and she wanted to enlist Davidson’s help. 

“She asked how much the class was going to give,” Davidson said. “I told her that we had a target of $1 million, which I thought was pretty ambitious. She said that wasn’t thinking big enough, and that it should be $2 million.” 

After recovering from the initial jolt, “My thought was, ‘I’m going to like this Dean,’” Davidson recalled. The class came up with just $1 million, but there’s a good chance that was more than it would have been if not for Sullivan’s hard charging style. “She’s always willing to stretch, and to challenge others to stretch, too.” 

Ask alumni, faculty, students, or anyone else connected to the Law School about the Dean, and you are likely to hear the same comment: Kathleen Sullivan operates at one pace and one pace only—flat out. “Kathleen runs at a pace about triple that of most mortals,” said Duane Quaini ’70, Chairman of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP. “It’s hard to remember it’s been only five years since she became Dean. The number of things she’s accomplished in such a short time is amazing,” said Quaini. 

A cursory look at Dean Sullivan’s accomplishments is impressive. Under her tenure 14 new faculty have been hired—about one-third of the total faculty now at the School—many of whom are rising young stars. A little noticed= technology and law program was turned into what is arguably the top program in the world. During one of the most severe economic recessions in decades, she raised $63 million. She revitalized the clinical law program to give students real-world experience. She remodeled most of the School’s aging facilities, including the library, classrooms, lounges, and many of the faculty offices. And she helped raise the reputation, visibility, and intellectual vitality of the School. 

“Kathleen has lots of candle power. Any school that has her is bound to go up several notches in overall wattage and voltage,” said Laurence H. Tribe, Professor at Harvard Law School. “The intellectual life at the school seems to have increased as well. The number of articles that get published by Stanford faculty that I pay attention to has moved up on my own Richter scale since she became Dean.” 

Of course, no dean could accomplish all of these things on his or her own, even a dean with as much energy and talent as Sullivan has. Faculty play a critical part in the hiring process and, along with students, in creating the intellectual life of the school; alumni contribute ideas, time, and money; and staff are responsible for making sure it all gets done. 

But the dean is the person who provides the essential ingredient that no one else can—leadership. The dean is the one responsible for developing and articulating a vision for the School, providing a strategy of how to get there, and driving that strategy to completion. And that’s just the start. The dean also has to be a role model for the faculty and students, provide the public face for the School to the rest of the world, work with university administration to get resources for the school, and more.

Being dean is a demanding job, one that places immense demands on anyone who takes it on. Yet Sullivan did it, and did it with aplomb, even though it was at times far from easy. In fact, her five-year tenure has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. When Sullivan became Dean in September 1999, it was the height of the economic boom. The stock market was up. Silicon Valley was awash in optimism and money. It seemed as if there was nowhere to go but up, even for the Law School. 

“We began dreaming of what a dorm of the future and a library of the future would look like,” recalled Sullivan of one of the early brainstorming sessions that was held to plan the School’s future. “We imagined a space that wouldn’t have traditional law books, that would have multimedia centers and places where students could come in and do digital research. It felt like we were dreaming in digital.” 

Well, the digital dream was soon over. Less than a year after becoming Dean the tech boom had become a tech bust, the stock market had begun its long downward spiral, and much of the paper wealth Sullivan was counting on to fund her dreams, along with some of the real wealth the School had accumulated in its endowment, had begun to evaporate. As if that weren’t bad enough, two years into her deanship the tragedy of 9/11 took place, putting an exclamation point to the end of the booming 1990s. 

Through it all Sullivan remained optimistic, with her goals in place, and her plans in motion. One of Sullivan’s early dreams was to completely rebuild parts of the Law School, starting with the library. The aging physical plant hadn’t been updated since it was first built during the decade most architects would rather forget—the 1970s. So she set about remodeling the interior space. First came the classrooms, then faculty offices, then the library, and then the lounges. 

“The striking thing about the physical renovations is that they just happened,” remembered George Fisher, Academic Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Robert E. Paradise Faculty Scholar. “One day, somehow, the work was under way, and weeks later it was done. Who knows when all of the preparation and preliminaries were done.” 

Faculty members are notoriously prickly when things aren’t working just right, or when their routines are disrupted, making the remodel that much more impressive. “The classroom remodeling was particularly miraculous. Construction began in May, the day after last exam,” Fisher said. “Construction concluded that September, the day before classes resumed.” Even more miraculous, everything worked. “No sane person would try to squeeze a major construction job into such a tight time window,” Fisher said. “And no one else would have succeeded.” 

No surprise—Sullivan is tackling one more project before her tenure ends. The moot court room was torn up days after the end of spring term 2004. She expects the remodel to be finished by the start of term in the fall. 

Sullivan has often said that the Law School was located in Silicon Valley, and that it needed to become of Silicon Valley. The School didn’t use the latest digital technology to research and teach the law, and hadn’t put sufficient emphasis on developing a strong practice in the area of technology and the law. The remodeling of the physical plant took care of the first problem, and Sullivan’s very first faculty hire took care of the second. 

In 2000, Sullivan convinced Larry Lessig to leave Harvard and join the faculty. Lessig is one of the leading experts on the interplay of copyright and technology, particularly the impact of the Internet on copyright. Just as important, Lessig has become one of a rare breed, a public intellectual, someone who shapes the public debate about an important issue. He writes a column for Wired magazine, is frequently quoted in the mass media, appears on television, testifies before Congress, and keynotes at technology conferences around the globe. Since coming to Stanford, Lessig has published three widely read books. His latest, Free Culture, has garnered widespread coverage in the media. 

“After hiring Larry, I could have quit and still counted my deanship as a success,” said Sullivan, only half joking. “Deciding who you want is one thing, but the biggest part of hiring is to convince someone to come here,” said Richard Craswell, William F. Baxter—Visa International Professor of Law. “Kathleen was instrumental in getting Larry to come.” 

All of which had an electrifying impact on the School’s technology and law program. “She picked it up and infused it with energy,” said Davidson, who chairs the advisory committee to the Program in Law, Science & Technology. 

Sullivan also put a renewed emphasis on the School’s international law program, which had been neglected for some time. “When I started in 1999, I met with Warren Christopher ’49, who candidly told me, ‘We were stronger in international law in 1949 than you are today.’ That was a real wake-up call,” said Sullivan. 

Since then Sullivan has hired several faculty with expertise in international law. She also launched the LLM degree program, which each year brings 22 foreign lawyers to study at the School. “It was an instant way of internationalizing the Law School with smart and accomplished foreign lawyers,” she explained. 

The third area that Sullivan focused on rebuilding was the School’s clinics. “I thought we really needed to strengthen our position in public interest law. Since we had such a great set of public law courses, I kept trying to find out why we weren’t preeminent in public interest law,” said Sullivan. “The answer that kept coming back was, ‘You don’t have a clinical program that is as strong as, say, Yale, NYU, or Georgetown.’ We were losing some of the best and brightest students to other law schools because they wanted to experience live client representation while they were in law school.” 

So Sullivan set about creating a clinical program. And that required hiring a new type of faculty member to create the clinics. “You cannot take great lawyers, hire them to teach students, and then expect them to write the same scholarship as tenure line faculty. It can’t be done. You have to have a clinical faculty line where the criteria are be a great lawyer, be a great teacher of lawyers, and be a great manager of cases. Often those were not the same type of faculty that were great researchers or scholars.” To solve this problem Sullivan created a new clinical faculty track. Now there are eight clinics at the School: Youth and Education, Supreme Court Litigation, Environmental Law, Cyberlaw, Criminal Prosecution, Community Law, Civil Rights, and beginning next year, Immigration. 

Creating a strong clinical program, rebuilding the international program, revitalizing the law and technology program, and remodeling the School all require money. Lots of money. That’s why deans spend so much of their time on fund-raising. When Sullivan became Dean, the School was just concluding the largest campaign in its history, raising about $115 million. “My first year I had the heady experience of closing the campaign that Paul Brest had so tirelessly and energetically conducted,” Sullivan said. 

To keep the School abreast of its competitors, Sullivan had to encourage major donors like Davidson to give even more. And she did just that. Sullivan helped raise $63 million over five years, quite an achievement considering that the economy was in a deep recession for most of her tenure. 

Money raised by the School goes to many areas, but none is more important than the faculty. Sullivan has raised money to lure faculty, endow new professorships, and fund new programs and centers. Just as important, she’s put a tremendous amount of her own time into recruiting. 

“She is an enormous and effective recruiter of faculty,” said Quaini. “She has attracted lateral faculty of great distinction from major law schools. I’d also give her credit for recruiting junior faculty. Kathleen was very good at recruiting the best and the brightest of the future generation of legal scholars.” 

“Kathleen realized that we had to rebuild at the junior level at the same time that we were bringing in top senior people,” added Craswell. “She brought in a lot of junior faculty by law school standards.” 

“She’s worked very hard on faculty recruitment,” said Deborah Rhode, Ernst W. McFarland Professor of Law. “It’s one of the less visible, but more important pieces of the job.” It requires putting together a package that includes not only the faculty post, but a range of other details like housing and jobs for spouses. “The Dean has to be involved because she has the leverage to put it together,” said Rhode. 

Sullivan also spends a great deal of her time holding on to the faculty the School already has. “The number of our faculty who have had offers from other schools that were more lucrative, but decided to stay here, is phenomenal,” said Sullivan. “There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into keeping the faculty you have. We’re in a new world of faculty mobility. Law faculty, like sports stars and top partners in law firms, make a lot of lateral moves these days. There’s a lot of free agency.” 

Competition between law schools doesn’t stop with the faculty. “The competition for students is pretty intense,” said Fisher. “More intense than many faculty realize.” Anything a school can do to gain an edge is critical, and in recent years that edge was Sullivan. 

Sullivan was a public figure well before she became Dean, but even during her deanship Sullivan continued to appear on television, get quoted in the press, and write for the mass media. “It helps draw students. Students draw their impressions to some extent from what they see in the media,” said Fisher. “Having a Dean with star power helps build the profile and reputation of the School.” 

In five short years, Sullivan has accomplished a great deal. As Stanford President John Hennesy said, “Kathleen Sullivan has been one of the preeminent deans in U.S. legal education. She has articulated a strong vision for the Law School and has led the School unerringly toward that vision. There is a new sense of vitality and excitement at the Law School that will be one of her greatest legacies to the School.” 

Sullivan may be ending her deanship, but she’s not leaving Stanford. Following a yearlong sabbatical, she will return to the faculty as the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, a title she held before and during her deanship. Sullivan will also launch a new Center on Constitutional Law. The center will be established in the memory of Gerald Gunther, who died in 2002 after spending four decades on the Law School faculty. (See “From the Dean” on p. 5 for Sullivan’s plans for the new center.) 

Sullivan was a natural choice to head the new center. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Constitution. She coauthored the 14th edition of the leading casebook in the field, Constitutional Law, as well as the casebook First Amendment Law, with Gunther. She also coauthored New Federalist Papers: Essays in Defense of the Constitution, with Alan Brinkley and Nelson W. Polsby. 

“At this point in our nation’s history, the discussion of constitutional rights and the limits of power is of momentous consequence,” said Gerhard Casper, Professor of Law, President Emeritus, and Peter and Helen Bing Professor of Undergraduate Education. Casper appointed Sullivan as Dean when he was President. “With the founding of this center and Kathleen at its helm, Stanford will be in the vanguard of intellectual exploration of these issues.” 

The Law School has long been a leader in constitutional law. Former Deans Paul Brest and the late John Hart Ely were, like Sullivan, leaders in the field. And the Dean-designate, Larry Kramer, who takes over from Sullivan on September 1, is also a constitutional scholar. (See “Larry Kramer Named Stanford Law School Dean,” on p. 6.)

 “I’ve learned an enormous amount from this job, from the alumni, and from my colleagues,” said Sullivan. “But I’m going back to the thing that has been the continuing strand throughout my whole life, constitutional law. Right now my greatest passion is to be a lawyer and a legal scholar and to throw myself back into constitutional law, which is my first and lifelong love. 

“This is an unbelievably important time for constitutional thought, about the balance between security and liberty and the balance between security and the First Amendment,” Sullivan said. “There’s no shortage of issues for us to worry about.” Sullivan may be ending her tenure as Dean, but there is little doubt we will be seeing more, maybe much more, of her in the years to come.