Why Lawyers Are Good, and Other Subjects: A Conversation with Dean Kathleen Sullivan

Below is a Q&A with Dean Kathleen Sullivan which appeared in the Stanford Lawyer Issue 56 (Fall 1999).

Why are good lawyers important to society?

Society will always have conflict, what Madison called “factions of passion” and “factions of interest.” American society is particularly prone to conflicts because we are deliberately, since the framing, very heterogeneous. You need somebody in society to anticipate conflicts, to come up with processes and structures of institutional design to prevent and manage the conflicts. That’s what lawyers do at every level. You could say that every lawyer who is handling a divorce or child custody arrangement or a start-up of a new company is also serving that public role of making sure that private interactions are handled in a way that minimizes social conflict. I think one of the reasons lawyers are so undervalued is that when they do that well, it’s invisible. If you write a contract so that the shareholders and creditors and employees are all taken care of in the event of bankruptcy, nobody is going to stand up to applaud. If you do a good job and things go well, your work is somewhat invisible.

Do you think students today are going to law school for the right reasons?

Many students today have the same motivations as I had when I went to law school. They are very interested in public service and the social good-they’re idealistic about using the law to help society. But a lot more students than in my generation are going to law school with the desire to enter exciting areas of business and finance and the development of new enterprises. Certainly a lot of students coming to Stanford are excited about the opportunities in Silicon Valley. It’s a much more sophisticated group of students than in my generation. They are much savvier and better informed.

Are they different in other ways?

Students are more conservative. When I was a student, law schools tended to attract liberals, and conservatives went to business school. I think the classes now are much more intellectually diverse, and that’s a healthy thing. When I started out in teaching you couldn’t get a good class discussion going about the death penalty or abortion because everybody was on the same side. It’s very important for people to be exposed to a diversity of views because no view is worth having if it can’t stand up to a challenge.

Fundamentally, what’s the most important thing the Law School should be teaching?

Students need rigorous analytical skills; that is at the core of what we teach. In life, problems do not come to you packaged under headlines the way they do in a syllabus. The more we introduce rigorous hypotheticals and problem sets and case studies into our teaching, as my colleagues and I have been doing at Stanford for several years, the more we will help to simulate life.
Law school study is a form of practice, just like baseball practice or piano lessons. We’re not trying to teach the theory of pitching, we’re teaching how to throw the ball. We’re not trying to get students to understand the theory of composition, we’re showing them how to play a solo.

In what ways is a Stanford legal education distinctive?

We excel at all the traditional aspects of legal education. Stanford Law School has been, you might say, “the capital of casebooks” over the last generation. Gerry Gunther wrote the casebook on constitutional law for a generation. Marc Franklin and Bob Rabin wrote the casebook on torts and accident law for a generation. Paul Goldstein wrote the casebook and treatise on copyright law that changed a generation of intellectual property practice. We still have that great traditional strength of teaching through the case method, with a faculty that is permeated with superb traditional legal teaching skills. But in addition to those traditional teaching strengths, this is a place that is very devoted to pedagogical innovation. We’re trying a lot of things that aren’t traditional. We’re getting students to think on paper as well as to think on their feet.

How important is the involvement of alumni to the future of the Law School?

Very important. Throughout the campaign, there was a level of engagement and excitement with our alumni that I think was historical, and we need to sustain that momentum. We can’t look at the campaign as something that has passed and now we can rest on our laurels; quite the opposite. The campaign opened up new possibilities. I want to try to tap that tremendous energy to take us to greater heights. The generosity of alumni toward the school has been remarkable. Even more important, the engagement of alumni in ideas about legal education and about the profession and how the two connect has been vital to the school. Also, having distinguished attorneys from practice coming to the Law School from time to time serves as inspiration for students.

What improvements will you emphasize?

We devoted much of the campaign to building our human capital; making sure that our faculty was the best that it could be. We need to turn our attention now to physical capital. We need to modernize our facility. It’s a sturdy piece of 1970s architecture that will serve us for a long time, but the interior needs to move into the 21st century. We need classrooms that are state-of-the-art technologically. We should have students conferencing on the Internet during class from their laptops; faculty should be able to teach from spreadsheets projected on a screen from a laptop. We have early 20th-century classrooms for a 21st-centwy world. It’s time to pay attention to the physical and technological infrastructure of the Law School.

How do you expect curricula will change?

One place we have to grow is in the empirical study of law. We also need to build Stanford’s international profile. Law practice is globalizing just as business has. We need to make this a law school with an international legal education strong enough to produce more Warren Christophers. We ought to be the premier institution for the study of law related to technology. We’re set in the very center of the digital world here in Silicon Valley. We need to study it, write about it, and research it. We need to implement it in our classrooms, and we need to predict how it’s going to change legal practice.

Why Lawyers Are Good, and Other Subjects: A Conversation with Dean Kathleen Sullivan

You mentioned our proximity to Silicon Valley. How important is Stanford’s location in attracting students and faculty?

I think students are just beginning to catch on to the fact that we are located in the most exciting place in the country, and the most innovative place for both business and law practice. I expect location to be an increasing advantage as people discover that Silicon Valley is not just a place but a state of mind.

Our location also presents certain challenges, doesn’t it?

To remain competitive with our peers for the best faculty and best staff, we’re going to need the resources to deal with the very high cost of living here. Recruiting top-notch faculty and staff is one of my biggest challenges.

How do you respond to the suggestion that the temperate climate promotes a laissez-faire attitude?

(Laughing) I don’t believe that you can only be serious in terrible weather. If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here.

Are you having fun?

Yes. It’s incredibly challenging and humbling, but it’s incredibly fun. Taking this job taught me that the Law School that I thought I understood is a great big complicated prism with many facets that I’m only beginning to understand. The interaction with colleagues, staff, and students has been enjoyable. Ask me again in a few months.