Judith C. Areen, Esq.

Judith C. Areen- Oral History Summary

by Eva Petko Esber

In 1989, Judith C. Areen became Dean of Georgetown University Law Center. With that post she also became one of three Executive Vice Presidents of Georgetown University. At the time, she was one of only two women in the United States serving as Dean at a major university law school. Similar statistics were a familiar attribute of her experience since high school. When she entered Cornell in 1962, it was one of only two Ivy League schools admitting women as undergraduates. At Yale Law School, she was one of only eight women in the Class of 1969. A few years later in 1972, when Dean Areen joined the faculty at Georgetown University Law Center, she was one of only three women on the faculty. Given her trailblazing path, it is not surprising that Dean Areen was recognized by the Women’s Bar Association in 2007 with the Janet Reno Torchbearer Award. She is also a subject of the America Bar Association Women’s
Trailblazer Project.

Dean Areen remained the Law Center Dean and an Executive Vice President at Georgetown for fifteen years. Over those years, the Law Center made advancements in expanding the campus infrastructure, garnering alumni support, attracting high performing faculty and students, and offering innovations in curriculum. She then returned to the Georgetown law faculty in 2004, and in 2006 also served as President of the Association of American Law Schools.

In an oral history taken by the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, Dean Areen shares her experiences of entering the legal profession when doors were opening somewhat wider to women. But more profoundly, the oral history concentrates on Dean Areen’s expertise and insights on legal education and the administration of higher education, generally. Those were the issues to which she dedicated her professional efforts for more than thirty-five years. The oral history consists of eight sessions, convened between October 2003 and December 2008. The interviews were conducted on behalf of the Historical Society by Timothy G. Lynch.

Dean Areen was born in 1944 in Chicago, where both of her parents had been born and raised. When she was three years old, her father’s job took the family to South Bend, Indiana. In her oral history, Dean Areen recalls her childhood in South Bend as simple and carefree, with the freedom to wander the neighborhood and ride bikes with friends. Not surprisingly, she was a strong student. The classes that impacted her most reached beyond memorization and retention of facts. For her, the best teachers “made it seem as if there was always more to learn to do. They made the subject larger rather than smaller . . ..” She was Valedictorian of her 1962 co-ed high school class. Inspired by particularly wonderful math and science teachers in high school, she set
her sights on attending college to pursue a Math major and Physics minor.

In her oral history, Dean Areen recognizes that she and her siblings, a younger sister and brother, had a heightened appreciation for the opportunity to go to college. They knew the roadblock their mother encountered and the hurdles their father overcame. Dean Areen’s mother, a talented pianist, was offered a substantial scholarship to a Conservatory. The scholarship would have paid the tuition after her freshman year in exchange for services as a piano accompanist in those later years. Despite having the financial means to cover the first-year tuition, Dean Areen’s 2 maternal grandfather, by then a widower, did not see the purpose of higher education for his daughter. The opportunity was foregone, and Dean Areen’s mother never attended college.
Dean Areen’s paternal grandparents were likewise not supportive of her father’s ambitions to attend college. But her father was able to secure a job in a bank and put himself through Northwestern University at night. He obtained his degree, and became a Certified Public Accountant.

Dean Areen was accepted as an undergraduate by Cornell. A high school counselor, however, spoke with her parents and cautioned them against allowing her to go off to this “eastern” university. But she enrolled at Cornell, with her parents’ support. The four years she spent at Cornell were both wonderful and unsettling. As she expressed in the oral history, Cornell was “always larger than I was”, keeping with what had always excited her about education. While pursuing her major in Math as a freshman, she was also intrigued by the liberal arts, and all the fascinating subjects and books to be explored. Then, during that same first year, the faculty advisor for her Math major asked to meet with her over coffee. He made a “not-at-all subtle pass”, and she was shaken. “What I remember is being afraid and how difficult it was to cope with in a society that had no word for it, no thought about it, no places for students to go.” She changed her major to English. In the oral history, Dean Areen shares that she was fortunately ready to make that change anyway. But she carried the recollection of that experience with her, particularly in her role as Dean, personally recognizing the importance of anti-harassment procedures implemented by colleagues at Georgetown.

At the same time, during her years at Cornell, she experienced an awakening of political and social consciousness. The Cuban Missile Crisis arose during her freshman year. President Kennedy was assassinated during her sophomore year. The Watts Riots broke out the summer after her junior year. Vietnam War protests spanned the years. As she recalls, “By my senior year, everybody was much more politicized in the sense of we’re doing our work and we’re learning things, but we are spending most of our talking time and activity time on ‘What about the war?’ ‘What about civil rights?’” During her senior year, she served on a disciplinary board that convened hearings, among other things, concerning students who had engaged in war protests. Counsel had been retained to represent the students, and she took notice. “It was watching the lawyer in that hearing and seeing that somehow lawyers knew how to do things when people were in trouble for exercising their political rights, and that’s quite important. I certainly knew I wanted to focus more on these issues of policy and government.”

In the Fall of 1966, Dean Areen entered Yale Law School. As noted above, she was just one of eight women. As a first-year student, she was the target of the Socratic method in her contracts class much more often than her male peers. But the teacher was actually a favorite of hers. Rather than hazing her, she surmises he took advantage of the novelty of her participation as a device to keep the class focused. She came to realize that many of the male students had never attended class with a female student, or engaged with one intellectually. Dean Areen’s civil rights and public interest leanings also continued to evolve at Yale, but now with a legal focus. The summer before law school, she worked for her Congressman from Indiana. Her summer jobs during law school included a stint with Ralph Nader, time at a California law firm, and a 3 position in Atlanta with Charles Morgan, head of the Atlanta office of the ACLU. Her path forward, she concluded, would not be a law firm.

When Dean Areen started her professional life in 1969, her first job was with the Office of the Mayor in New York City. It was a time, she recalls, when even an elegantly dressed woman would be turned away from a restaurant in New York for wearing a pantsuit. Aside from serving once as the “Night Mayor” – on duty overnight to ascertain if anything warranted waking Mayor Lindsay – she generally worked in the Budget Bureau on higher education programs relating to the City University. From there, Dean Areen moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work with The Center for the Study of Public Policy. The Center, created by a group from Harvard, was working under a grant to evaluate school vouchers as a tool for the War on Poverty during the Nixon era. The interactions with Harvard faculty through that job turned her thoughts, for the first time, toward teaching at a law school.

When Dean Areen sought advice about obtaining a teaching position, the feedback was discouraging. She was too young, she was told, and worse yet, she was a woman. But, in 1972, she began as a new professor at Georgetown University Law Center. In the oral history, she describes the issues navigated by their small cadre of women professors. Among them was being evaluated by students, including young men who had never encountered women in positions of authority. Despite the challenges, in 1976, she obtained tenure at Georgetown. In the oral history she shares recollections of her own experience in the tenure process, as well as insights on the process more generally. Dean Areen also addresses the circumstances that led her to develop
expertise in Family Law. After being assigned to teach the class when she first arrived at Georgetown, she grappled with the absence of up-to-date teaching materials. In 1978, Foundation Press published the first edition of her casebook, Family Law: Cases and Materials. In the oral history, she also discusses the changing issues at the forefront of Family Law throughout her time in academia, from child custody to divorce to same-sex marriage. Over the years, her casebook in Family Law was re-published multiple times, with co-authors joining later editions, and she taught Family Law throughout her years on the faculty.

Between 1974 and 1976, Dean Areen also volunteered with the Democratic National Committee. Through that work, she met Richard Cooper, a lawyer at Williams & Connolly. When President Carter was elected in 1976, they both took positions with the new Administration, she at the Office of Management & Budget evaluating government reorganization issues, and he at the Food & Drug Administration as Chief Counsel. They were married in 1979. Their two sons, Benjamin and Jonathan, were born in 1980 and 1983. After she left the Carter Administration and returned to Georgetown in 1980, teaching Administrative Law was added to her resume. In 1984, she became an Associate Dean, and in 1989 Dean.

Dean Areen discusses in the oral history the multi-faceted obligations of being Dean and Executive Vice President. She discusses tackling the necessary challenges of fundraising, the importance of developing and maintaining alumni relationships, and the impact of both on achieving Georgetown’s significant campus improvements. She also discusses attracting and retaining talented faculty, from the emphasis on scholarship to the “poaching” of professors among law schools. She discusses her involvement in developing and defending the Law 4 Center budget, and protecting the independence of the Law Center within the University. The discussions include, for example, the controversy over protecting the independence of the Law Center at a time of serious financial losses at the Medical Center and litigation pertaining to recognition of gay student groups at the University. After stepping down as Dean in 2004, she jokingly referred to herself as a “recovering administrator.” But in the oral history she also candidly acknowledges the physical and mental change. She was no longer “on the alert” at all times for how something might affect the institution, its students, or its faculty.

The development and implementation of Georgetown’s alternative curriculum for first year students, “Curriculum B”, is also discussed. With inspiration from innovations at Harvard and a grant from the Department of Education, Curriculum B was developed over a two-year period, beginning in 1989, by a full cross-section of the faculty. As explained by Dean Areen, features of that curriculum included more interconnection across the first-year subjects, to see relationships, for example, between civil procedure and torts. Curriculum B also included more emphasis on reading secondary literature, including evolution of approaches to law and legal realism.

As a fitting capstone to Dean Areen’s career, she authored the casebook, Higher Education and the Law, published by Foundation Press in 2009. She began teaching a course on that subject when she returned to the faculty after stepping down as Dean. Although she worked on the casebook for three years, she emphasizes that the book was far longer in the making – it was a book she could not have written without her years of service as Dean. In writing the book she mixed her experience as an administrator with the diligence and perspective of a scholar. She researched the history of colleges and universities, the relevant law, and how both evolved. Universities are fascinating but little understood human creations, she observes. Although we should be in awe of what they accomplish when they work well, she emphasizes the challenges just to keeping them functioning, much less improving. Issues such as tax policy, accreditation and regulation, “are important not just because it’s nice to work in an ivory tower, but because they’re part of what has made America something I’m proud of. They’re a key part of social mobility.” Her goal in writing the book, she explains, was to build up the scholarly field of legal education, to “take this field which is very active in the world of courts and universities and private legal practice and make sure it exists in the scholarly community, both for faculty and for students.”

The oral history of Judith C. Areen offers a look at the journey of a talented young woman in the 1960s and 1970s who seized the opportunity for an Ivy League education previously reserved for men, and fashioned a career in the law shaped by the political and social justice issues of the era. It also offers appreciation of Dean Areen’s contributions thereafter as a gifted lawyer, educator, administrator and scholar into the Twenty-first Century.