The mood at Columbia Law School’s Medal for Excellence luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria on Friday ranged from weary to optimistic. All the while, servers kept wine glasses more than half full.
“There’s a lot of good news [about the Law School] that I can report, but I don’t need to say that not all the news is good,” Dean David Schizer said.
The crowd gathered to honor Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law Henry Paul Monaghan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, CC ’73, Law ’76.
Holder was a last-minute no-show after a blizzard hit D.C. on Friday.
In his introductory remarks, Schizer painted the school as one still recovering from the economic crisis, but faring well relative to its peers. The job market for lawyers has reached a low, but 90 percent of the Law class of 2010 is lined up with jobs.
In response to the tough market, the school bolstered career programming. “Our efforts are paying off,” Schizer said, referring to students’ success in the job market and a 28-percent increase in Columbians receiving clerkships. Schizer added that based on what he knows, the job placement of students from peer schools ranges from 55 to 85 percent.
But the school has had to tighten its budget. Its endowment has declined by 20 percent, which represents a loss of $6 million in annual revenue each year—approximately 6 percent of the operating budget.
Still, Schizer finished on a high note, informing the audience that Columbia received a record of 8,505 applicants last year. The application process led to an incoming class made up of 52 percent women. The law school also added 27 faculty members over the last six years, a record high.
University President Lee Bollinger, Law ’71, presented Holder’s medal in absentia.
Holder enrolled in Columbia Law School, embarking on a legal career that landed him as an adviser for then-Senator Barack Obama, CC ’83, and, eventually as attorney general. He served as a University trustee beginning in 2007, but resigned upon his confirmation as attorney general. Holder spoke at Columbia College Class Day last year.
“History shows that it is always in times of war and seasons of fear when we are most at risk of forgetting the freedom and commitment to justice that is in fact our nation’s greatest strength,” Bollinger said. “What so many of us admire in this president and in this attorney general is their confidence in our system of justice, their refusal to be ruled by fear that is indeed the very goal of terror, and their determination that America can lead best by example.”
Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law John Coffee introduced Monaghan, a constitutional scholar who has been at Columbia since 1983 and has argued three cases in front of the Supreme Court, one of which included the First Amendment right to produce "Hair" in a municipal auditorium.
Coffee lauded Monaghan’s commitment to junior faculty. “At least in my 30 years now here ... no one has come close to serving as he does as the mentor-in-chief as our junior faculty,” Coffee said, describing the long lines that form outside Monaghan’s office each morning as he labors over the drafts of articles by young professors.
Monaghan expressed his pleasure at living in New York and teaching at Columbia. “I would say that for me they would be the happiest years of my life,” he said, emphasizing the school’s success in recruiting entry-level faculty. “I can think of no time during my experience in which the Law School has grown in such different ways.”
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