Leadership is a predominant theme in this issue of BC Law Magazine. That’s because, in ways bold and subtle, so much of what defines Boston College Law School has to do with leadership.
Leadership is embedded in Boston College’s commitment to train students to do good in the world, a mission requiring that its graduates have the courage of their convictions and the will and know-how to act upon them. It is rooted in the emphasis on excellence in the classroom and beyond. And it is manifest in our photo feature “Leadership,” where we present portraits of sixteen of the Law School’s high-achieving alumni.
The same chemistry of dedication and purpose can be found in the essays of law school applicants. BC Law’s admissions officers are tasked with selecting, from thousands of aspirants, the ones who possess leadership qualities in the BC mold. “Writing Their Way into Law School,” the personal statements of five first-years from the Class of 2017, offers insight into the depths from which those qualities spring.
The launch last September of the Center for Experiential Learning demonstrates how the Law School is playing a leading role in legal education itself, as the academy adds to its clinical programs to meet market demands. When Dean Vincent Rougeau acted promptly last summer to offer supervised legal student services to Smarter in the City, an incubator for start-ups in Boston’s Dudley Square (“The Little Incubator That Could”), he was making good on his promise to be among the first to innovate in experiential programming.
BC Law is also poised to have significant impact on public policy, thanks to Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport’s choice of the Law School as the new home of its renowned law and public policy center (“Historic Gift Brings Rappaport Center to BC Law”).
On nearly every page of the magazine, there are similar examples.
Take Professor Diane Ring’s down-in-the-trenches analysis of how to protect the tax base of developing countries and reform an international tax regime that’s unfair to them (“Making International Tax Laws Just”). Consider Professor Ray Madoff’s call for better regulation of philanthropy, which instigated both a convention at the Law School and a reform movement (“Where Has All the Money Gone?”), or alumnus Catalina Girald’s inspired decision to turn her lingerie company into a means to lift women in her native Colombia out of poverty (“Law, Pluck, and Lingerie”).
The impulse to dream big dreams and to realize them, to recognize need and offer a hand—that sounds a lot like leadership at Boston College Law School.
Vicki Sanders, Editor
vicki.sanders@bc.edu
Photograph by Adam DeTour