Introduction to Faculty Essays - Gary J. Simson

• Citation: Vol. 63 No. 3
• Publication year: 2012
• topic: Business of Law

Introduction to Faculty Essays

by Gary J. Simson*

This collection of essays by Mercer law faculty is the result of a process that my predecessor as dean, Daisy Floyd, set in motion in the fall of 2008. At that time, Dean Floyd named an ad hoc committee to conduct a comprehensive review of the law school's celebrated Woodruff Curriculum. Adopted after extensive discussion, planning, and debate, the Woodruff Curriculum went into effect in 1990. Within a few years, the American Bar Association recognized the Woodruff Curriculum's distinctive and remarkably forward-looking contribution to legal education by naming the law school as the recipient ofthe Association's prestigious Gambrell Professionalism Award.¹ The much-discussed MacCrate and Carnegie Reports that appeared in 1992 and 2007, respectively,² unmistakably owed much to the Woodruff Curriculum that preceded them.

The fall of 2010 was my first semester at Mercer as a faculty member and dean. It was also the ad hoc committee's fifth semester of existence. Several times that semester, I discussed the committee's work with its chair, Professor Virginia Williams. I also met twice with the entire committee. The committee members' high level of sophistication about issues of law school curriculum and pedagogy was truly striking. The committee clearly had given a great deal of thought to a wide array...