Dean’s Advisory Council

When then-incoming Dean Erwin Chemerinsky decided to convene a dream team of advisors to help him answer the question “If you could create a totally new kind of law school, what would it be like?,” he turned to the nation’s leading judges, academics and lawyers.

In February 2008, this historic gathering of leading thinkers from the bench and bar met to hear his vision, and discuss questions like: How do we make sure UC Irvine School of Law equals the nation’s top law schools in terms of quality, yet is innovative and different? Does it make sense that most U.S. law students graduate without ever having interviewed a real client, strategized to address real people’s legal problems, done oral advocacy for actual individuals or causes? Since law doesn’t exist in a vacuum, should we teach about the law’s intersections with other disciplines such as business, public policy, criminology, environmental sciences and biotechnology? Since public service is every lawyer’s professional responsibility, shouldn’t it be integrated throughout the legal education experience?

The dialogue begun that day helped inform development of a new curriculum, with no one saying “We’ve always done it like that, so it must be right” or “We’ve never done it like that so it must not work.”

These Dean’s Advisory Council members will continue to work with the founding faculty to reinvent what law school can be if you’re as fortunate as UC Irvine to start with a clean slate, flush resources and extraordinary support that includes enthusiastic university leadership and students, the Orange County legal and business community, regional and national employers, and professors, lawyers and judges across the country.

Dean’s Advisory Council Members

  • Preeta D. Bansal—General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Management and Budget
  • Viet D. Dinh—professor and co-director, Asian Law and Policy Studies Program, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.
  • Joe Dunn—chief executive officer, California Medical Association, Sacramento, Calif.
  • Christopher F. Edley Jr.—dean, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley, Calif.
  • Harry T. Edwards—judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Washington, D.C.
  • Thomas V. Girardi—founding partner, Girardi & Keese, Los Angeles, Calif.
  • Andrew J. Guilford—judge, United States District Court for the Central District of California, Santa Ana, Calif.
  • John C. Jeffries Jr.—dean, Emerson G. Spies Professor of Law and Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville, Va.
  • Louis Kaplow—Finn M.W. Caspersen & Household International Professor of Law and Economics, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass.
  • Pamela S. Karlan—Kenneth & Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, Stanford University School of Law, Stanford, Calif.
  • Herma Hill Kay—Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law and former dean, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley, Calif.
  • Stephen G. Larson—judge, United States District Court for the Central District of California, Riverside, Calif.
  • Thomas R. Malcolm—partner, Jones Day, Irvine, Calif.
  • Carter G. Phillips—managing partner, Sidley & Austin LLP, Washington, D.C.
  • Francis E. Quinlan—partner, Kester & Quinlan LLP, Newport Beach, Calif.
  • Mark P. Robinson Jr., Chair—senior partner, Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson, Newport Beach, Calif.
  • David G. Sills—presiding justice, California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division Three, Santa Ana, Calif.
  • Gary J. Singer ‘74—partner, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Newport Beach, Calif.
  • James Irvine Swinden—owner, A.R.C. Properties, Newport Beach, Calif.
  • Deanell Reece Tacha—chief judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Denver, Colo.
  • George H. King—judge, United States District Court for the Central District of California