Our (revamped) alumni magazine

I am exceptionally pleased to announce the publication of University of Louisville | Law, the magazine for alumni, students, and friends of the University of Louisville School of Law. University of Louisville | Law aspires to be a magazine that befits a forward-looking law school that advances its university's metropolitan research mission, enriches the professional lives of its graduates, and serves the larger community that sustains it.

To download a copy of the fall 2007 issue of University of Louisville | Law, click here. Or click on the image of the magazine's cover at right. What follows is an excerpt from my introduction to the inaugural issue.

Jim Chen
Dean and Professor of Law

Dedicated by the people of Louisville to the higher training and useful education of its aspiring youth.

That pledge was solemnly inscribed inside Grawemeyer Hall in 1927, when the University of Louisville completed the building that houses its central administration. The Law School's home, known today as Wilson W. Wyatt Hall, was built in 1941. The Commonwealth stood much closer than it does today to the pillars of its traditional economy: bituminous, burley, bourbon, and bats. Kentuckians have a particularly keen sense of history, and that history envelopes a campus that traces its origins to 1798 and to a law school has operated longer than every other law school in the United States save four.

Like the state and the city that nurture them, the University of Louisville and its law school harbor a deep respect for our history and for our traditions. But no community or university can afford to dwell in the past. The business of education — the enterprise of providing higher training and useful education to aspiring youth — necessarily looks forward. We are proud to be a school with a past. We take even greater pride in our future — in the knowledge we produce and in the service that we deliver to our community and the world at large.

The extraction industries of Louisville's past continue to yield to a knowledge-driven economy. Our community's fortunes lie in biomedical research and health care, in the dissemination and adoption of cutting-edge information technologies, and in the harnessing of the logistical muscle that powers global business. The overwhelming rate of technological, economic, and societal change places the highest possible premium on law as civil society's primary instrument for avoiding conflict, resolving disputes, and building institutions. Vastly greater progress and prosperity lie in collective than individual action. By enabling individuals to empower themselves and to form lasting, productive organizations, law makes that progress possible.

The Law School, in short, looks firmly forward. So should a magazine that befits the school's mission.

University of Louisville | Law takes the place of the publication known as The Brandeis Brief, which served as the Law School's alumni magazine in the mid-1990s and throughout the current millennium. This magazine's new name and new look reflect a change in emphasis in Louisville Law's strategic direction and in its relationship with its external constituencies.

Our Law School is the final resting place and a lasting memorial to Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The influence of Justice Brandeis on our school is profound, particularly insofar as Justice Brandeis championed scientifically informed legal decisionmaking and dedication to public service. But those very values — specifically, the scientific imperative matched with a calling to serve the greater good — inform this magazine's change in editorial direction and graphic design. Law does not live by tradition alone, but rather on every value unveiled by the the light of reason and given voice through popular democracy.

"A science which hesitates to forget its founders," said the scientific philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "is lost." Or, as the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has rephrased the point, progress in a discipline can be measured by the rate at which its founders are forgotten. Naming our magazine for a twentieth century innovation in Supreme Court practice does inspire constitutional historians and Justice Brandeis's most devoted fans, but the new name, University of Louisville | Law, brings even greater benefits. Our new name celebrates the astonishing progress that the entire University of Louisville, including its School of Law, has made in the past generation. The emphasis on the word Law reminds us that the professional lives of our graduates are not limited to litigation, let alone appellate practice, but rather span the full range of professional callings informed by law. Embracing the name of our city befits a law school dedicated to its university's metropolitan mission.

Finally, insofar as the new name redirects this magazine toward its proper focus — that of the law school’s students, graduates and friends — we invite our readers to submit all the news they care to share with the readers of University of Louisville | Law. Reader-generated and reader-oriented content represents this magazine’s best hope for fulfilling its aspiration to be published twice rather than once a year.

The time has come for Louisville Law to cast its eyes firmly forward. We must, as Justice Brandeis himself would have counseled us, let our minds be bold.