Santa Clara University

Faculty Who Lead

Santa Clara Law faculty members model the way for future lawyer-makers.

By Susan Vogel

 

Leadership used to be an elusive concept—some people seemed to have it an others did not. It did not appear to be something you could work at, much less teach. Now, leadership courses are taught in nearly every business school and are making their way into schools of government, engineering, and even medicine. Santa Clara Law has been ahead of the curve in terms of leadership training. As reported in the fi rst of this series on leadership, it was the fi rst law school in the nation to offer a leadership course. Created and taught by Robert Cullen, a mediator and attorney at the Cullen Group in San Jose and founding president of the San Jose Leadership Council (www.sjleadership.org), the course is based on the work of Barry Posner, dean of SCU’s business school and co-author of The Leadership Challenge. Leadership for Lawyers was fi rst offered in Spring 2006 and has been a hit with students. Cullen is now writing a book on leadership for lawyers.

LEADERSHIP DEFINED

In The Leadership Challenge, Posner and co-author Jim Kouzes define leadership as "the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations." In addition, leadership is based upon "an identifiable set of skills and practices that are available to us all, not just a few charismatic men and women." They further identify five "practices of exemplary leadership": challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and encouraging the heart.

Cullen has further analyzed how these attributes contribute to producing lawyers who lead in private practice, the judiciary, business, and government. (Past issues of this publication have profiled a number of leading Santa Clara Law alumni in these areas, including Leon Panetta, Rolanda Pierre-Dixon and Edward Panelli.) But do these leadership qualities apply to law school faculty? Are there "leading lawyers" in the faculty of the law school? And if so, how does their leadership benefit students, the law school as a whole, legal education, their communities, and the legal profession?

Stephanie Wildman

CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

Stephanie Wildman has an expertise and a passion: public interest law. Not content to have it merely accepted by law schools, she wanted to see it integrated into the curriculum. "I went to law school thinking it was about social justice. I was surprised to learn that it was not the focus of legal education," she says. So she co-authored a casebook on social justice, a major step toward making it a legitimate area of law school study.

In 1999, Wildman, a Stanford graduate (law and undergrad), founded the Boalt Hall Center for Social Justice. Seeing the commitment of Santa Clara Law’s faculty to social justice as an area of excellence and specialization, Wildman joined Santa Clara Law in 2001 as professor of law In January, Wildman, who has taught for 32 years, was given the highest honor a law school professor can receive: the Society of American Law Teachers’ (SALT) Great Teacher Award, which recognizes "individuals who have made especially important contributions to teaching."

Wildman was chosen because, according to SALT, she has "inspired countless students and colleagues through her teaching, her activism, her scholarship, and her unique ability to build institutions and coalitions." In receiving this award, Wildman joins Cruz Reynoso, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and other well known lawyers and jurists who have been recognized as excellent educators.

Leaders, says Cullen, challenge existing institutions to open them up to new ideas. They push institutions to examine things they normally wouldn’t, creating positive change and thwarting stagnation. Wildman did this in her effort to include social justice in the curriculum. Her credibility in her field, and her ability to inspire others, are hallmarks of her leadership, says Cullen.

INSPIRING A SHARED VISION

Gerald Uelmen has devoted his entire career to criticizing and critiquing the criminal justice system. Now, he is facing a new challenge: to bring a group representing all aspects of the criminal justice system to consensus regarding problems in the system and recommendations for solutions.

Last year, Uelmen was appointed executive director of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, established by the state senate to study the causes of wrongful convictions and to recommend reforms. The commission is made up of nearly two dozen men and two women from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and education levels: rank and file police officers, police leadership, public defenders, private defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, victims’ rights advocates, and even a rabbi.

With the charge of consensus, advocacy is not the right approach. The task requires, in Uelmen’s words, "a lot of persuasion, patience, and putting aside your own agenda." The commission identified specific things that lead to convictions of innocent people, including false confessions, false eyewitness identifications, and false testimony from jailhouse snitches.

The next step was to recommend solutions. This is where, Uelmen says, compromise was required. "In every context I could have gone further," he says. For example the commission ultimately recommended audiotaping all confessions while Uelmen wanted them videotaped. It recommended a jury instruction on identifications from bad line-ups rather than excluding the evidence altogether, as Uelmen preferred.

"This was not a question of whether I win or lose on my agenda," says Uelmen, "but the recognition of a broader purpose." The commission has released three of eight reports designed to improve the criminal justice system. The rest are to be completed by the end of the year.

Cullen says that Uelmen, in his service as executive director of the commission, "has shown one of the most important aspects of leadership: the ability to inspire a shared vision and to move away from advocacy to cooperation."

"Working diligently toward developing a shared vision with people who have largely different views requires a high level of listening skills, cooperation, and creative problem-solving," says Cullen. Uelmen concurs that communication is paramount in working with a diverse group. "It is very important to listen to the views of everyone. If you leave a group out, it is going to create opposition," he says.

Though Uelmen credits much of the leadership on the commission to its chair, former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, he says that his own experience as dean of Santa Clara Law provided him with many of the skills of cooperation that have been essential. Uelmen served as dean 1986 to 1994. He holds a B.A. from Loyola Marymount and a J.D. and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center.

Visit Closing Arguments for an essay by Uelmen about his work on the commission.

DEVELOPING EXPERTISE

Santa Clara Law Professor Kathleen "Cookie" Ridolfi is also a member of the commission. Her role, however, is different from Uelmen’s. As director of the Northern California Innocence Project, she serves on the commission to represent the interests of falsely convicted criminal defendants.

"A lot of what I’m doing is drawing on my experience with the Innocence Project to educate other commission members about how difficult it is for an innocent person to prove his or her innocence," she says. "For example, when a witness represents to the commission that criminal defendants have equal access to crime labs, I can say, ‘yes, maybe in theory, but in practice, access is meaningless without the cooperation of police and prosecutors who control the evidence.’"

Ridolfi’s role as a leader is vast. At age 23, she was one of the "Camden 28," a group prosecuted for acts of civil disobedience in opposition to the Vietnam War. She represented herself in a four-month-long jury trial and was acquitted.

SANTA CLARA LAW PROFESSOR KATHLEEN "COOKIE" RIDOLFI (second from right) was a leader in developing expert testimony in battered women’s cases and was a pioneer in the application of social science to jury selection. In 2004 she co-founded the Innocence Network, a collaboration of innocence projects across the United States, Canada, and Australia.

After obtaining her J.D. from Rutgers (where she also did her undergraduate work), Ridolfi became a leader in developing expert testimony in battered women’s cases and was a pioneer in the application of social science to jury selection. In 2004 she co-founded the Innocence Network, a collaboration of innocence projects across the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Ridolfi’s expertise is rivaled only by her passion. "DNA has put to rest the question of whether we convict innocent people. We do it, we now know why it happens, and we know what we have to do to fix it. I’m committed to making that happen."

Credibility and passion, Ridolfi has discovered, help overcome perceived obstacles to leadership. "Leadership," she says, "requires confidence and a belief in what you’re are doing." As the only woman on the commission for a time, and now, one of only two women (and one who does not wear suits), she has felt "personally challenged" at times. "I’ve had to remember that even if I feel a little uncomfortable, I have a job to do."

As Cullen sees it, "one of the critical attributes of leadership is a passion for positive change and the persistence to carry it out. It is what drives leaders when accepting the challenge of leadership. It takes more than hard work, and Professor Ridolfi has obviously lived out her commitment to creating a positive influence for the last 35 years."

ENCOURAGING THE HEART

"When they rape your sister and they loot your belongings, you have to shut up because you’re going to be killed."

Acting as a war crimes prosecutor, Beth Van Schaack, an assistant professor at Santa Clara Law, stood in a black robe before a panel of judges and heard this testimony from Jarelnabi Abbass Abusikin, who survived an attack on his village in Darfur, Sudan.

The question Van Schaack had asked him was whether anyone had lodged a complaint about the violence. "We don’t have that concept of complaint," he said.

Van Schaack believes they should. A graduate of Yale Law School and Stanford, Van Schaack clerked at the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and was trial counsel for torture survivors in a historic human rights lawsuit against two Salvadoran generals, which resulted in a $54.6 million verdict. Last fall, she served as one of three prosecutors in a mock trial against Sudanese President Omaral-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Beth Van Schaack

Van Schaack says that in spite of the proceeding’s having no legal authority, and the outcome being somewhat "predestined," nevertheless, "there was a sense that seeing it play out in a legal fashion in a legal forum, driven by witness testimony, gives it a real value." At a minimum, it may be a rehearsal for an actual trial. "All the materials are being sent to the International Criminal Court," says Van Schaack, "and the witnesses may end up testifying before that body which is investigating crimes in Darfur. It also brought media attention to the atrocities in Darfur."

Van Schaack’s efforts will not stop there. She is currently writing a casebook on international criminal law and is involved in efforts to establish accountability for Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

Cullen sees Van Schaack’s involvement in seeking justice for victims of war crimes the essence of the leadership trait Posner calls "encouraging the heart." "Her actions are enlightening and very influential," says Cullen. "How can students not be inspired by her story? They can see how lawyers use their legal skills to accomplish something extraordinary. It may happen in a student’s first job or 20 years down the road, but I am sure her actions will encourage many of her students to follow her pathway of social leadership."

EXERCISING CREATIVE VISION

Do you have a Wikipedia entry? Eric Goldman does, even though he’s not a high-profile celebrity or a notorious criminal. Goldman, an assistant professor and academic director of the High Tech Law Institute, is described on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org), as "a noted scholar of Internet law, technology, and marketing practices" who "has blogged about his bet … that Wikipedia will have failed by December 2, 2010."

Wikipedia created the page, says Goldman, after his prediction of Wikipedia’s failure received wide attention. Goldman drew his conclusion based on the fact that the people who provide the content for Wikipedia "devote substantial amounts of time to it, but receive no cash and no reputational benefit."

Goldman, who practiced as an Internet attorney for eight years before becoming a full-time academic, started his blogs (blog.ericgoldman.org) two years ago at the suggestion of two of his students. He figured he’d have just three readers, those students and his mom. Instead, 2,000–3,000 people a day visit his two blogs: a legal blog focused on technology and marketing law and his personal blog where he opines on interests such as vegetarian restaurants and Slinkies.

Goldman thinks his blog allows his views on the latest developments in technology law to reach a far greater audience than he would reach through the traditional medium of legal scholarship—the law review article. It also keeps him on top of new legal developments, which helps him make sure his students learn cutting-edge material.

The blog has become a source of tips for industry followers. For example, in March 2006, Goldman wrote about an important new case involving liability for online keyword advertising. Two days later, the posting led to a radio interview with a local NPR affiliate. A week later, his views on the case made the New York Times.

Goldman, who earned his undergraduate degree, J.D. and MBA from UCLA, is now focusing his energies and talents on Santa Clara Law’s High Tech Law Institute. "I am hoping to take this fantastic asset and enhance the way it serves its constituents—students, practitioners, alumni, academics, and the world at large."

Cullen calls Goldman a "creative visionary." "He is taking creative thoughts and predictions and communicating in a creative fashion. Leadership is grounded in credibility and Goldman demonstrates this as well in his blog. To communicate effectively and to be effective, you need credibility in your field. The blog is influential because of his credibility as a legal scholar and high tech observer," says Cullen.

ENABLING OTHERS TO ACT

Growing up in the inner cities of Washington, D.C. and New York City, Allen S. Hammond IV saw what hap-pened to people who had less information and less access to the public process: they got left behind. When he took a position at MCI in 1985, he walked into his office and saw the combination telephone-computer on his desk, and realized that his success depended in great part on his ability to use it.

These experiences underlie Hammond’s commitment to seeing that broadband service will be accessible to all citizens, regardless of location, education, ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomic status. "It’s the citizens who have responsibility for making democracy work," he says, "and increasingly, access to the Internet is necessary for civic participation as well as simply to function as a student, a parent, an employee, or a business."

Hammond, a graduate of Grinnell College, and the School of Law and the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, is director of the Broadband Institute of California. In the fall of 2006, the Broadband Institute joined with SCU’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society to convene and host a community panel whose purpose was to give a voice to members of the public who do not normally get to participate in public technology decisions. The panel provided an opportunity to weigh in regarding the Wireless Silicon Valley Network, a partnership of 42 municipalities and Internet service providers whose objective is to provide basic wireless internet service to Silicon Valley.

Normally, such a weigh-in would involve a public hearing where citizens have just a few minutes to speak and where their voices would be drowned out by the expertise and lobbying power of the corporate interests.

Hammond, being a professor, chose a different approach. "My job as a professor is to enable students to go out and act. I used this same model in the public arena," he explains. First, the two organizations drew a panel from a wide cross-section of Silicon Valley all the way to Gilroy. Then, they educated the panel on the issues involved and allowed them to draw conclusions about what the policies should be. Finally, the panel was able to ask questions of the experts, including the ISPs who would be providing the services.

"Surprisingly," says Hammond, "the panel concluded that people should pay for access. They felt it was better to pay something for high quality service than to get minimal quality of service for free. They also felt that people often don’t appreciate things as much when they don’t have to pay for them."

Hammond predicts that in a generation or two, all public "lifeline" services will be delivered by broadband Internet, as will be all television and phone services. He hopes that the net effect of his work is that "people in policy-making roles will take note of the fact that the public needs to be more involved rather than merely having a public hearing where you get three minutes to speak. They need to provide citizens the information they need and the time to deliberate so that the decisions the government makes are more representative of the total community government serves."

Cullen says Hammond’s approach to gaining public input is a great example of leadership. "He has worked with others to take on a complex issue and to give a group of people access to influence the process. He has opened up the process to these citizens and empowered them to act. Enabling others to act is an essential leadership quality and Hammond has done it in an exemplary way."

COMMITMENT TO THE FIELD

Should people who live in upscale urban neighborhoods enjoy lower auto insurance rates if that means higher rates for their poorer rural neighbors? If global warming sends a hurricane to New York and leaves in its wake the damage of ten Katrinas, is private insurance adequate to the task? How can we make auto insurance affordable and available to those with marginal incomes?

These are among the issues Santa Clara Law professor Robert Peterson confronts as a two-term member (eight years in all), and now the chair, of the Standing Committee on Insurance Law of the state bar. Made up of lawyers from the insurance industry, the Department of Insurance, and Peterson (the only academic), the committee meets monthly to discuss laws and regulations relating to insurance. It meets with insurance regulators, candidates for insurance commissioner, and legislators. It publishes updates on insurance law on its Web site and in the state bar’s Business Law News, it presents educational programs, and it sometimes proposes legislation.

Peterson, who directs Santa Clara Law’s nascent Institute of Insurance Law, says that insurance is one of the most important social issues we face. "Everything we do in life, and even death has something to do with insurance. You can’t drive a car, buy a house, or do business without insurance," he says. "You can seldom die—at least with dignity—without insurance."

But at the academic level, we pay scant attention to it, says Peterson, even though a good number of Santa Clara Law graduates end up in insurance law. "We should teach, research, and publish much more in this area," he says.

Moreover, says Peterson, "There is a large social interest in insurance." For example, how regulators set rates for auto insurance has deep political and social implications. It is largely a zero sum game. Lower rates for one group means higher rates for another. When is this sensible public policy, and when is it unreasonable discrimination?

Peterson’s service on the committee gives him an insider’s look into what the hot issues in insurance law are, enabling him to present his students with a perspective far deeper than how to read a policy.

Not only that, says Cullen, but "the essence of leadership is credibility, which means not only maintaining an interest in your field, but being a part of the ‘think tanks’ or groups of experts who influence the field and influence our legal institutions from law schools to CEB courses to the courts and our legislative bodies." These committees, says Cullen, "exist to maintain a high level of expertise in the practice and in the profession as a whole" and are therefore very valuable in terms of maintaining high standards and a continued commitment to excellence in the specific area of practice and beyond.

Peterson, who studied at San Diego State, Stanford (J.D.) and Oxford, took over chairmanship of the committee in 2006 from Barry Leigh Weissman, a Santa Clara Law alumnus.

USING CREATIVITY

When most first year civil procedure students are being gently introduced to the concept of jurisdiction, Marina Hsieh is dropping hers right into a war zone, exploring the application of due process to so-called "enemy combatants." "I try to connect everything with what’s happening in the real world," she says. What about Pennoyer v. Neff? "That old, moldy case that alienates everyone from civil procedure?" asks Hsieh. "When we get to it, I teach it as a political scandal."

Hsieh herself stays in the center of the storm as part of the leadership of the ACLU. A national board member for almost ten years and an executive committee member for seven, Hsieh (who holds an A.B. from Harvard, a J.D. from Boalt, and clerked for Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court) has helped shepherd the organization during a period of great change and phenomenal growth.

Marina Hsieh

In the past five years, the ACLU has nearly doubled in membership from approximately 300,000 to more than 573,000, and it has "expanded the umbrella of what civil liberties mean," she says. "It’s becoming more basic as in ‘they’re listening to your phone calls’ and also more complex" with issues of international law and of science, such as privacy issues relating to genetics. The war on terror has raised many other issues in areas of international law, torture, and due process.

Vision—"anticipating what’s around the corner" in Hsieh’s words—is the key to leadership of the ACLU. Though she is quick to point out that as a member of the 83-person board she cannot take a lot of credit for its leadership, Hsieh says that when called on to lead, she draws on her experience as a Coro Fellow right out of law school, where she was taught "to think like a leader." "I am more of an out-of-the-box idea person," she says. "I tend to want to think creatively."

Hsieh’s leadership has resulted in greater diversity on the board. Having grown up "a Chinese-American in a Bible-belt Texas town" (Waco), she is dedicated to diversity, and not only in terms of ethnicity. Hsieh is currently chairing an ACLU board committee to design an affirmative action policy that extends beyond race and gender to enhance hiring of sexual minorities and people with disabilities. If adopted, it would govern the nearly 800 jobs in the ACLU’s national and affiliate offices, as well as serve as a cutting edge model for progressive private sector employers. "The law is incredibly complex in this area, but still doesn’t answer all the questions," she says. "Where the law leaves off, leadership carries us forward."

Santa Clara Law, she says, is the perfect match for her. "It has a diverse student body combined with the right mission, to train lawyers who lead and who don’t just aim for competence, but also for compassion and conscience."

Hsieh, says Cullen, is challenging the educational status quo and creatively focusing the students on real-life world events. "She is challenging the students to be inspired by global issues and is making the topics she is teaching relevant in today’s world. Leaders in education find more effective ways to teach; Hsieh is bringing the world into the classroom, both through her teaching methods and her ACLU work, and she is also demonstrating to her students ways to be creative and effective in their future profession."

MODELING THE WAY

Each one of these professors leads students by example and contributes to the mission of Santa Clara Law by showing uncompromising standards in their work in and out of the classroom. They all, says Cullen, demonstrate the leadership quality Posner calls modeling the way by "practicing what they preach" and "walking the walk."

While these faculty members are all highly accomplished in their fields, the leadership skills they demonstrate are within the reach of everyone, says Cullen. "Leadership is not some highbrow theory practiced only by heads of companies, dean of universities, and politicians. It is practiced by everyday lawyers and professors who inspire others to accomplish extraordinary things."

SUSAN VOGEL is a frequent contributor to Santa Clara Law.