An unusual gift is established to honor student public interest work.

The $3,000 that accompanied the Keck Award may not have matched the Nobel Prize, but for a recent Law School graduate, struggling to pass the bar and then begin a career representing indigent children, it was manna from heaven. “Quite honestly, I don’t know what I would have done without it,” remarks Corene Kendrick ’03, a Skadden Fellow working for Children’s Rights Inc. in New York. 

Of course, it was a tremendous honor, Kendrick says, to have her peers and members of the faculty select her for the award recognizing her public interest work during law school. But the money meant a lot to her: it helped cover her move to New Jersey and pay for the first and last months’ rent on an apartment—as well as for her dog’s emergency visit to a veterinarian. 

The Keck Award was a bit of a misnomer, as it is was conceived of—and financed annually—by Professor Deborah Rhode, director of the just-retired Keck Center on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession. Rhode’s role wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t well known. (“I didn’t know she was the sole source of funding,” remarks Kendrick.) 

But Rhode’s days of quasi-anonymity are over. In December, Rhode, the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, donated $60,000 to endow the award permanently, and despite her modesty, it will now be known as the Deborah L. Rhode Public Interest Award. 

Gifts of this magnitude usually don’t come from law professors. Rhode apparently wiped out her savings account to make the donation, because she believed the Law School needed to honor public interest work the same way it recognizes the highest grade point average and the best advocacy skills. A trophy alone wouldn’t be sufficient: “A monetary award sends a stronger signal,” she says. 

Rhode seeks to deflect all attention from herself and to emphasize the extraordinary public interest devotion of the student recipients of the award. “This should be about the students,” she explains. “The students who make time to do public interest work beyond their course work are a very special group.” She brushes aside talk that her gift was a sacrifice, instead casting it as convenient and efficient. “I have the pleasure of knowing that there’s one less thing for the executor to do if I get hit by a truck tomorrow,” she says.