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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Professor chosen as Law School dean Moving faster than the U.S. Senate, the university has named a successor to Harold Hongju Koh as dean of the Yale Law School. And true to the Law School's tradition, the new dean was chosen from among its faculty. (The school has not chosen someone from outside its faculty as dean since 1916.) Robert C. Post '77JD, a 61-year-old constitutional law scholar who's been on the Yale faculty since 2003, will take over from Acting Dean Kate Stith on July 1. Meanwhile, Koh's nomination as legal adviser to the State Department -- announced in March but delayed in the Senate -- is finally moving toward a confirmation vote. Post's appointment comes as the Law School -- like the rest of Yale, and like law schools and universities across the country -- confronts tighter finances resulting from the economic downturn. Yale Law's endowment, valued at $1.2 billion a year ago, is managed by the university and has plunged in the same proportion as the overall Yale endowment. University president Richard C. Levin '74PhD estimated that drop at 25 percent in December. "The major challenge is to preserve the essential mission of the school" in the face of less abundant resources, Post said in a phone interview with the Yale Alumni Magazine. Beyond that, "I'm acquainting myself with the inner workings of the school, so it's premature to have an agenda." A specialist in the First Amendment, equal protection, and legal history, Post taught law for more than 20 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served on the university budget committee. At Yale, he says, his administrative experience has consisted mainly of directing discrete programs: the annual Global Constitutionalism Seminar and the Law and Media Program, co-directed by Professor Jack Balkin. When it comes to running the entire law school, Post notes, "my learning curve is very steep at the moment." In an e-mail announcing the appointment, Levin called Post "ideally positioned to move the Yale Law School forward. He is greatly admired by his colleagues for his wisdom and judgment, and his commitment to sustaining the excellence of the Law School is unwavering." Before becoming a legal academic, Post earned a PhD in history at Harvard (also his undergraduate alma mater); clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice William Brennan; and worked as a litigator at the Washington, D.C., firm of Williams & Connolly. |
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