The oral history of Judith C. Areen follows the journey of a talented young woman who seized the opportunity in the 1960s 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.
Areen was born in Chicago and grew up in South Bend, Indiana. In the early 1960s she enrolled at Cornell University, one of only two Ivy League schools admitting women at the time. Her Cornell years were both wonderful and unsettling. Her political and social consciousness grew as she experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and Vietnam protests. As a college senior Areen served on the disciplinary board that, among other things, convened hearings for students engaged in war protests. There Areen observed how retained counsel represented students “in trouble for exercising their political rights.” As a result, she knew she wanted to “focus more on issues of policy and government.”
When Areen entered Yale Law School in 1966, she was one of only eight women. In contracts class, she found herself a target of the Socratic method more often than her male peers. She surmises this targeted action arose from the novelty of her participation because, Areen realized many of her fellow male students at the time had never attended class with a female student or engaged with one intellectually.
After law school, Areen began working at The Center for the Study of Public Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She soon developed an interest in teaching law school, and in 1972 she became one of only three female faulty members at Georgetown University Law Center. In her oral history, she describes navigating female and male student interactions with those who had never encountered a female in a position of authority.
Areen briefly left Georgetown Law but returned in 1980, eventually rising to the position of Dean and Executive Vice President of the Law Center in 1989. Areen discusses her many obligations as Dean, including the task of attracting and retaining talented faculty, offering innovative curriculum, and protecting the independence of the law center within the larger institution of Georgetown University. When she stepped down in 2002, she jokingly referred to herself as a “recovering administrator”, candidly acknowledging the physical and mental strain of the position and having to always be “on the alert” considering consequences to the institution, students, and faculty.
In 2009, Areen authored the casebook, Higher Education and the Law, a scholarly publication influenced by her experience as an administrator. She explains her goal in writing the book – to build up the scholarly field of legal education and 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…”
Dean Areen’s oral history was taken by Timothy G. Lynch between 2003 and 2008. Take a look, you won’t be disappointed!