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ORAL HISTORY OF DEAN JUDITH AREEN
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the
District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is Judith C. Areen, Dean of Georgetown
University School of Law, and the interviewer is Timothy Lynch. The interview took place in
Dean Areen’s office on December 17, 2008. This is the eighth interview.
Mr. Lynch: It’s December 17, 2008. This is the eighth session of the Professor Dean Areen
oral history. What can you tell us? What are you doing now? You worked just at
the end of this Fall semester. What’s going on in your life?
Ms. Areen: I am at the end of the semester and I’m very pleased that the casebook I’ve been
laboring on for more than three years has been shipped by the publisher this week,
and I will be using it for the first time to teach in January.
Mr. Lynch: What’s the title?
Ms. Areen: Higher Education and the Law. Not a very creative title, but a tradition in law
school casebooks. My goal in writing this casebook, much more than my
teaching it, was to build it as a scholarly field in legal education. Before
Foundation Press accepted it, they first consulted their advisory committee of
other faculty and deans who decide whether to go forward with the manuscript.
Their message was, “You know, this is pretty interesting. This ought to be taught
at more law schools, and maybe if there’s a casebook it will be.” So that’s my
goal, 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.
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Mr. Lynch: Do you know other law schools where that course is taught now?
Ms. Areen: It tends to be taught at graduate schools of education. Only a handful of law
schools have the course. It’s typically taught by a general counsel. I know at
Harvard it’s taught in the Graduate School of Education. At Cornell, it may
actually be in the law school, I’m not sure. But in both instances, the general
counsel of the university teaches it. And they’re terrific, capable people, but they
are not coming at it with the time or the context that a scholar would bring. So
I’m hoping this book will provide a little more history, a little more perspective,
and be useful to both law faculty and general faculty.
Mr. Lynch: How long did it take you to write the book?
Ms. Areen: It was about three years, although it was longer than that in the sense that I could
not have done it, I think, before I had served time as a dean. In many respects,
developing the class that I’ve taught now for four years and the book was a
chance to go back and understand situations I faced as a dean without the time to
really understand why it meant doing a lot of reading on the history of colleges
and universities and on relevant law and how we got to this point in time. It’s a
terrific and interesting are of law and history so this has been a good process for
me. I hope the book lives up to the fun I had in putting it together.
Mr. Lynch: You’re going to teach the class in the spring?
Ms. Areen: Yes, starting in January.
Mr. Lynch: I have a bunch of questions that look back over the course of our prior sessions.
Let’s go through them. Some of them are going to be referring to some old
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sessions. Let’s see how it goes. The first is going back to maybe the first session,
you talked about how when your father came home from France after the war,
your mom said, “Kiss daddy good night,” and you kissed the photo. What was his
reaction? Do you remember?
Ms. Areen: It’s interesting that we’ve talked about it a number of times lately. He still alive
and doing reasonably well. He’s 90. He’ll be 91 in February. He’s got early
Alzheimer’s, so he’s in assisted living. It’s a story that as recently as last year he
would bring up, and so I had the chance, as he was remembering it, to ask because
I wondered too. He said he felt really good about it because it meant, it told him,
that he was a figure in my life, even though he hadn’t been at home. And he
understood the confusion about it. He took it to mean that his wife, my mother,
had done a really good job of making sure I knew I had a father even when he was
overseas.
Mr. Lynch: Was it a funny family moment?
Ms. Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: Is your mom still alive?
Ms. Areen: She died three years ago.
Mr. Lynch: I’m sorry. You talked about remembering being in the garden with your
grandfather Peter. You said you had memories of it, but we didn’t really get into
what the memories were.
Ms. Areen: I don’t recall the time of when it happened, and I’m not sure, because I was under
two when my father returned, I don’t think I remember it from before that, but he
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was literally the father figure in my life when my father was overseas because my
mother returned home and lived with her father, so my grandfather had that role
for me. And it’s just that I have this memory and there are flowers and he’s tall
and I’m tiny. There’s a photograph I saw at some point too so I don’t know how
much the photograph has shaped my recollection.
Mr. Lynch: But it was the father-figure role that stuck out.
Ms. Areen: Right.
Mr. Lynch: We’re moving along. Who were you defending Nixon from in high school?
Ms. Areen: It would have been other students, and many of the students in my high school
were catholic, even though it was a public high school. Lots of my good friends
were part of Polish-American families, so I think for that reason there was a really
strong embrace of Kennedy. So it was in the context of politics. I don’t have a
clear memory of exactly when or where. I think it was a social studies class,
probably the teacher was a Kennedy supporter too, so I felt a little beleaguered.
Mr. Lynch: How was your argument perceived?
Ms. Areen: I’m sure not well. It’s interesting that one of the things I’ve noticed in reading
some of the stories, especially this past year about Hillary Clinton, is she has a
similar memory of having defended republicans at that point. It’s just a question
of our age and how you grew up. It wasn’t our own politics, if you will. It was at
that point a reflection of our family’s politics. And only later did I discover mine.
Mine turned out to be democratic, not republican.
Mr. Lynch: When you were growing up, do you remember if there was prayer in school?
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Ms. Areen: I don’t have a memory of it. It’s interesting, my husband’s public school in
Philadelphia, he can remember, and they would literally – because I think the
state’s statute said 25 words – so they’d stop in the middle of the sentence. They
knew the prescribed words. I don’t remember any prayers in my schools.
Mr. Lynch: What about songs? Christmas songs, pageants?
Ms. Areen: I remember singing Christmas carols. That was certainly an accepted part of
public school at the time.
Mr. Lynch: You talked about your mom imparting lessons to you indirectly when she’d be in
the kitchen having discussions with her sister. Do you remember any of those
lessons that she snuck into you?
Ms. Areen: With her sisters, two younger sisters, Lois and Jean. Growing up – because I was
the older sister – would often call me Lois and she’d often call my sister Jean, so I
learned to answer to the other name and she never confused them. It was
everything from how the world works to current events to it might be stories
about somebody in the family, comments about religion. They pretty much
ranged far and wide. Talking to her later after I was grown up, she said
something to the effect, well she was well aware I was paying a lot of attention,
and would sometimes deliberately send a message.
Mr. Lynch: Where were you sitting in relation to the kitchen?
Ms. Areen: A sense of being in the kitchen, maybe at the kitchen table, or sometimes I’d be
given a job helping out with making whatever we were making or doing dishes if
that’s what we were doing.
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Mr. Lynch: Did your children ever listen in the same way, did you try to impart lessons the
same way?
Ms. Areen: We did. It was a little different because with the two boys they weren’t in the
kitchen in quite the same way, but we would certainly do it over dinner and we
made a point of always having dinner with our kids even though we were both
working. Rich was and is especially wonderful about it, and he’d actually bring
up current events and ask provocative questions to get them thinking about, and it
was a wonderful opportunity.
Mr. Lynch: So you were able to have family dinners?
Ms. Areen: We did, we always did. We made a point.
Mr. Lynch: Five nights a week?
Ms. Areen: Most weeks, yes.
Mr. Lynch: Your husband has a law practice at Williams & Connolly. How did that work?
Ms. Areen: One of the family stories is he was in the Carter administration when I was and at
that point I would be spending time with his two kids from his first marriage, so
my step-children. It was sort of famous around the agency because he was chief
counsel for FDA. He left a meeting with the Secretary because he had a carpool.
He had his priorities straight, and we always honored them.
Mr. Lynch: And he was able to continue that when he went to the firm?
Ms. Areen: Yes. It meant that he would sometimes go back or would certainly bring work
home, so after dinner and after the kids were settled, we’d do more work.
Mr. Lynch: Has your son graduated from Harvard?
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Ms. Areen: It is his last year, his third year.
Mr. Lynch: Do you know what he’ll be doing?
Ms. Areen: He’s going to clerk for a judge in Chicago next year. It’s been another good year
for him. We were up there last month, and his team won the big moot court.
Mr. Lynch: What’s the name of the judge?
Ms. Areen: Frank Easterbrook.
Mr. Lynch: Terrific.
Ms. Areen: He tried for D.C. It didn’t work out, and I’m hoping that’s a sign that after next
year he’ll still think about D.C. because we’d love to have him here.
Mr. Lynch: I think Frank Easterbrook has sent some people to the show, the Supremes. [??]
Ms. Areen: Right. But even apart from that, to make his final decision. I don’t know if he’ll
even apply for that. It would just be great if he were here, so we’re hoping. We’ll
see.
Mr. Lynch: Has he talked about what he wants to do?
Ms. Areen: He’s leaning toward litigation, taking after his dad. But who knows. As you
know, these things develop over time, and some of it’s what you plan, and some
of it’s just chance cases and things that you encounter. He particularly liked, I
know he spoke about it this summer, he worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Baltimore, so there’s a consistent theme. Indeed, one case they were nice enough
to let him, they actually put his name on the brief when it went into the Fourth
Circuit. And the opinion came down and they won. He really drafted most of the
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brief so he was really excited that something he’d done as a law student could
make a real difference.
Mr. Lynch: When the court issued the opinion, does it have his name on it as well?
Ms. Areen: I don’t think so. I confess, I didn’t pay attention to that.
Mr. Lynch: We talked in general about the other kids who were important to you in high
school. Are there any names that stick out?
Ms. Areen: As particular friends from high school?
Mr. Lynch: Yes, or other people who were significant in general.
Ms. Areen: In shaping my life? Well my very best friend was Jill Swanson, and I feel bad
that we lost contact. We stayed in touch through college, but she moved and her
family moved so I’ve lost touch with her. Another friend from high school, Ann
Richards, is actually here in Washington. We see each other occasionally. She
ended up leaving the public high school and went off to private high school, the
only person in the group who did that. I think I mentioned most of the kids in my
class either did not go to college or went to the extension of Indiana University.
After high school and college in other parts of the country, and then my family
moved, so I never really was able to reconnect very much. I went back for Ann
Richards’ wedding, but there weren’t many kids from the high school there.
Mr. Lynch: We touched a little bit on the religious divide in college. You mentioned that
there were separate sororities and fraternities. Was there any more pervasive
religious divide at Cornell that you noticed?
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Ms. Areen: Besides the separate fraternities and sororities? I think I mentioned in the – it
wasn’t the dining hall, but it was the student union big eating space – men would
use it for breakfast because they didn’t have a dining hall near their dormitories
the way the women did, but it was literally religiously segregated so even though
you went in for coffee or a soft drink, one side of the room was Jewish, one
wasn’t, the middle was ironically called the Gaza Strip.
Mr. Lynch: At that time?
Ms. Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: Looking back, do you have any theory as to why that university was so
segregated?
Ms. Areen: I don’t. I am quite certain from the reading I’ve done it was not only Cornell. I
think I may have mentioned there’s this quite terrific book called The Chosen
that’s a history of admissions at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. It is stunning how
segregated they were. There’s not a Jewish faculty member before World War II
at any of these three, and there were strict quotas on admission, and it was on
religion, it was on race, and it was on gender. So higher education has a pretty
non-inclusive history. I would say from the reading I’ve done since, Cornell was
not atypical at all.
Mr. Lynch: You had mentioned how when you joined your sorority you tried to break some of
those religious lines down.
Ms. Areen: In fact, one more story. I’m just starting to read a book that has just come out
about Woodrow Wilson and his time at Princeton. As you may know, he’s now,
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before Barack Obama, the first professor so there are only two professors who’ve
gone on to become President, and Wilson was also the president of Princeton.
What you may not know is that the reason he leaves the presidency of Princeton
and then runs for Governor of New Jersey and then goes on to the U.S.
Presidency. He pushed very hard for residential housing. Now Princeton at the
time was all male, there are no women. But Wilson was doing it because he
didn’t like discrimination by class. He didn’t talk so much about religion, but
certainly class segregation. Basically the rich kids hung out in certain private
expensive houses and poor students didn’t. Wilson admired the way Oxford and
Cambridge provided housing for everybody, which was a way of reducing that
kind of class stratification, and he pushed very hard for it at Princeton, and the
board and the alumni resisted. And that’s part of why he was elected governor of
New Jersey because they knew he’d been trying to break down some of the class
stratification. Isn’t that interesting? But just to go on, it was important to me in
the sorority I was in to do what I could, and I don’t want to take personal credit
for it, I mean there were certainly other women who were concerned about these
issues. It was a time of inclusiveness, the summer of 1964 is the summer people
go to Mississippi and are doing voter registration, so there’s growing involvement
of students in national issues. We’re the first university, I think I talked about
this, to actually have a referendum on Vietnam. So people were becoming active
and concerned and trying to overcome discrimination of all kinds. But yes, it was
very much part of what I worked to try to change and had some success.
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Mr. Lynch: I was going to ask whether there was resistance to this.
Ms. Areen: Sure, but I also had a sense of support. The resistance, I mean when you’re doing
that kind of change, it was sometimes women in the sorority but it was more often
women making decisions to join even when the offer was made. Well, were they
prepared to cross these lines that seemed so socially firm.
Mr. Lynch: We talked a little bit about how some fellow law students at Yale were pretty
nasty about accusing you and other female students of taking the place of men
who had to go to Vietnam and would otherwise in their theory be at the law
school. We didn’t really talk about how that made you feel or what, if anything,
you said in response.
Ms. Areen: Well, it made me feel terrible, and it terms of what I said in response, it’s
interesting. It’s not my nature to be combative in a situation. I’ve always been of
the don’t get mad, get even, or find ways to change it, and I suppose it made it all
the more important for me to show that I was there for the right reasons. I was
not there to find a husband, I was there because I cared about law and justice and
working at it. I suppose it’s shaped some of the choices I’ve made since. I’ll add
one story. This fall – we have a program here for women who just graduated
from law school and want to come work for one of the women’s organizations in
Washington, it’s called Women’s Law in Public Policy Fellowship Program, and
Marcia Greenberger who’s the co-president of the National Women’s Law Center
is on the board with me and we have the difficult but wonderful job of picking
which women will get the fellowships for the next year and then we greet them.
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For the second year in a row, we had a coffee that the staff arranged and talked
about what it was like for us when we first came out of law school. Marcia, who
went to Penn the exact same time I was at Yale, told my story. It was stunning
because she and I had never had the conversation about what it was like and about
this accusation that because of you someone’s been sent to Vietnam. So it
reminded me it was not a personal experience, it was very much the time and the
situation.
Mr. Lynch: It sounds like it struck you though, it hurt.
Ms. Areen: Yes. But for a fellow student to be accusing you and then I did have to ask, I
mean, as a woman, I carried guilt that we had a draft so all the men were
vulnerable and I wasn’t, and I never did quite come to terms with that.
Mr. Lynch: But at the time, did you feel that the interlocutor or accuser had a valid point, or
did you recognize that it was not a valid point. You knew at that time.
Ms. Areen: Right, I knew it was not a valid point.
Mr. Lynch: We talked about your experience with that advisor at Cornell who made the notso-
subtle pass.
Ms. Areen: I forgot that I really told you all of this.
Mr. Lynch: Obviously it’s an important part of the story. When you told it, at least reading
the transcript, it made me wonder whether anything remotely like that also
happened in law school.
Ms. Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: Can you tell us a little about that?
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Ms. Areen: Let’s not elaborate, let’s just say yes.
Mr. Lynch: Did it happen once or more than once?
Ms. Areen: More than once.
Mr. Lynch: From professors?
Ms. Areen: Not from students, so yes.
Mr. Lynch: Well we can go right from there, are there any new plans for buildings on the
campus?
Ms. Areen: No, but what we can say is when, as occasionally happened during my deanship, a
student would come to me with a story about a faculty member. Needless to say,
I clearly understood how difficult it was for the student. I would’ve been firm
anyway, but I think I was particularly firm with the faculty member in this kind of
situation. It’s so difficult because the student – and it occasionally happens to
men, it’s not only women – particularly in law school is unlikely to want to
formally proceed. Occasionally they do, but who wants to start a professional
career like that. But to do nothing. So I found for me a comfortable in-between
of a very stiff conversation with the faculty member – I think I may have talked
about that – at the time.
Mr. Lynch: The law school has the land on the corner now. When we spoke a couple sessions
ago, there was no current plan to build anything there, but there was some thought
maybe a public policy school.
Ms. Areen: Right. That remains a possibility. Given the economy, I don’t know that there’s a
formal freeze, but it’s clear the university is, at this point, unlikely to proceed on
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major construction. I think most universities have announced that they’re
delaying capital construction. So it’s going to be put off for a while. And in a
way that’s good. In this sense, I do think it’s always tempting to proceed when
you have the possibility, but it’s very hard for any of us to fully anticipate what
will be different in another five years and so actually having a little more time to
make the best possible use of that land may turn out to be good.
Mr. Lynch: Do you have any idea how the law school’s endowment has been affected over
the past year?
Ms. Areen: Our endowment of course is part of the university and is managed as part of the
university, and we suffered losses. I don’t know the percentage at this point.
Both Harvard and Yale have announced 20-24% of losses. I don’t know that ours
are that high because the university endowment overall is so much smaller. It had
just gotten up to $1 billion last year and now we’re back under. But I did hear the
president say just a few weeks ago that one of the pluses of having a small
endowment is that your operating budget is not as dependent on it and that’s true.
So that is actually a help in this difficult time. Another way of saying it is we’re
more tuition-dependent than universities with larger endowment and that’s going
to put pressure on financial aid because students who didn’t need financial aid
when they started are now of course coming in. So it’s going to be a very difficult
time for private and public universities everywhere.
Mr. Lynch: Do you have any word on whether charitable giving to the law school has been
affected this year?
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Ms. Areen: I’ve not heard directly but it’s certainly being affected everywhere. In part, it’s a
double problem. Individuals have suffered losses so they’re rethinking their
giving and that’s the backbone of most university giving. But foundations have
also taken hits, many of them, to their endowments, just as universities have. So
they’re also cutting back. So it’s a double burden on universities and non-profit
fundraising.
Mr. Lynch: You mentioned in a prior session that a donor by the name of Scott Ginsburg
donated so that the clock tower right outside your window could be there. You
mentioned that he’s not related to Marty Ginsburg, but who is he?
Ms. Areen: He is a lawyer who worked on Capitol Hill. In fact he has stories of working his
way through. I think he was a legislative assistant when he was in law school,
and he focused on radio stations and built and expanded and did very well and
ended up selling a number of them, sort of a company of them if you will to a
larger radio company. I’m not sure I can recall which one he sold out to, but he
did very well and sold at a time and so is very well-to-do. He continues to have
projects but he doesn’t have a financial need to work at this point.
Mr. Lynch: Have you followed the continuing saga of Ave Maria Law School?
Ms. Areen: Nothing in the past six months. I did read that the faculty were suing to delay the
move but it seems to me unlikely that they’ll be successful.