In 2018, two years after D. Gordon Smith turned dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Younger College, he told an audience of law school advisors, “I need BYU to be generally known as, if not probably the most revolutionary regulation college within the nation, then one of the crucial revolutionary regulation faculties within the nation.” Now, Smith has introduced he’s stepping down as dean on the finish of this semester, after having been the second-longest serving dean within the college’s historical past.
So how did he do in pursuit of that aim? Throughout his tenure, he drove a variety of improvements round innovation and expertise, together with the launch of LawX, a authorized design lab dedicated to tackling access-to-justice points with options that deal with urgent authorized issues similar to debt assortment, eviction and asylum. He additionally served on two Utah Supreme Court docket job forces that led to the creation of the Utah Sandbox.
Additionally throughout his tenure as dean, he greater than tripled the quantity of scholarships out there to college students, noticed the regulation college’s nationwide rating rise from forty sixth to twenty third, pioneered a regulation and corpus linguistics program, and launched a worldwide management program.
Final week, I used to be on the college’s Provo, Utah, campus, and I sat down with Smith in his workplace to replicate on his almost seven years as dean.
Smith has been on this podcast twice earlier than:
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