Mission

To educate a diverse group of exceptional lawyers and leaders through our Law in Action approach to teaching, and to advance knowledge and equal justice under law through outstanding scholarship and public engagement with communities in the state and around the globe, bringing the Wisconsin Idea to the world.

Strategic Priorities

    1. Increase the flexibility of the Law School’s experiential offerings to provide students with an expanded range of options through which they can satisfy their degree and bar admission requirements, while guaranteeing a clinical opportunity to every student who wants one.
    2. Continue to innovate in our teaching methods so as to improve student learning.
    3. Consider changes to required courses to optimize students’ ability to gain the skills and knowledge they will need while efficiently meeting their degree and bar admission requirements.
    4. Consider adding online courses, certificates, or other programs that align with the Law School’s teaching strengths and have the capacity to generate additional revenue.
    5. Continue to expand financial aid, so that the outstanding legal education we offer is accessible to all who have the capacity to excel as lawyers and leaders.
    1. Develop policies, programming, and tools that support, promote, and strengthen student resilience, mental health, and well‐being.
    2. Regularly provide educational opportunities to faculty, staff, and students on what we can do to advance racial justice and develop a more inclusive and equitable learning environment.
    3. Create a first‐generation initiative that will help students from a diverse range of backgrounds acclimate to law school and the legal profession.
    4. Provide academic counseling and support for students for their courses or bar preparation as needed, through our Academic Enhancement Program.
    5. Support and retain our skilled and hard‐working staff by encouraging them to share their unique perspectives, expressing appreciation for their contributions, offering opportunities for career development and community building, and treating everyone kindly and fairly.
    1. Create a senior leadership position dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion empowered to advance these core values across all the Law School’s activities and to collaborate with DEI leaders across campus and at other law schools.
    2. Create a mechanism that empowers students, faculty, and staff to raise issues relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion and that provides helpful feedback and resources.
    3.  Launch anti‐racism initiatives that educational institutions around the nation could follow.
    4. Allocate funding to proactively foster pipeline or pathway opportunities for underrepresented groups to explore law school and the legal profession, while providing scholarships to ensure diversity in all dimensions.
    5. Communicate what the Law School is doing to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to internal and external constituencies, including communities within Wisconsin as well as national audiences.
    1. Increase opportunities for students to effectively compete for jobs around the country and the world by expanding the Law School’s network of employers, encouraging students to take bar exams, and supporting students from a diverse range of backgrounds.
    2. Develop programs highlighting the wide variety of legal career pathways, including careers serving the legal needs of smaller communities and rural areas in Wisconsin and enhancing access to justice.
    3. Consider changes to admissions and financial aid, curricular offerings, extracurricular programming, and loan repayment assistance that will promote satisfying job prospects for all our students.
    4. Explore potential changes to the Law School’s grading and class rank system that will enhance the competitive profiles of our students.
    1. Incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion values, including anti‐racism, into the Law School curriculum, including courses and other programming.
    2. Recruit students, faculty, and staff who reflect the multicultural, multiracial, and multiperspective world in which we live, embodying a rich diversity of identities, backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints.
    3. Foster teaching practices and opportunities for interaction among students, staff, and faculty that will engender the mutually respectful exchange of divergent perspectives in and out of class.
    4. Expand the Law School’s presence in indigenous law and deepen the Law School’s collaborations with Native nations and people in Wisconsin and throughout the country.
    1. Increase the size of our tenure‐track faculty to 35 by 2026, hiring people who are or will be leaders in their fields.
    2. Form a faculty appointments committee each year to consider lateral as well as entrylevel hiring opportunities, informed by long‐term teaching, research, and engagement goals.
    3. Emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion in our faculty hiring, pursuing opportunities and funding from central campus to support these efforts.
    4. Retain the outstanding clinical, legal research and writing, and tenure‐track faculty we have.
    1. Improve research support, including research assistants and assistance in obtaining external funding for research.
    2. Ensure that research‐productive faculty members receive two months summer salary or the equivalent in other support.
    3. Survey faculty to determine what additional resources would best help them improve the quality and quantity of their scholarship
    4. Consider changes to our workshops and other scholarly events that will foster greater participation and a more robust intellectual climate.
    5. Further align library priorities and resource allocation with faculty research needs.
    1. Raise the Law School’s scholarly profile and stature, by highlighting the excellence and diversity of our faculty to lawyers, law professors and administrators, judges, and potential students.
    2. Emphasize our strengths in research that crosses disciplinary and national boundaries, including Law and Society scholarship.
    3. Nominate our eligible faculty for awards and other professional recognition.
    4. Foster faculty and staff engagement with communities at the local, state, national, and international levels, including law and policy reform efforts.
    1. Create a new office suite, to be shared by our offices of Admissions and Financial Aid, Graduate Programs, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
    2. Create a new office suite for the Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic.
    3. Improve the Office of Career and Professional Development suite.
    4. Create a new Legal Research and Writing Center, with better offices for faculty and more joint space to facilitate interactions among faculty and with students.
    5. Provide a more welcoming space for the Academic Enhancement Program.

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