A Conversation With Kurt L. Schmoke

Photographs by Lloyd Wolf

On January 1, 2003, Kurt L. Schmoke took over the leadership of Howard University School of Law as dean after three years as a partner in the Baltimore office of Wilmer Cutler Pickering LLP.

Howard University School of Law is in the midst of a yearlong series of events celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the role played by Howard alumni in the landmark case. At the start of his second year as dean, Schmoke shared with Washington Lawyer his thoughts on legal education, the current state of the school, and how Howard is positioning itself to educate tomorrow’s lawyers.

Before entering private practice, Schmoke enjoyed a long career as a public servant, first as a member of the White House domestic policy staff during the Carter administration and then as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore. Beginning in 1982, he served six years as the state’s attorney for Baltimore before winning election as the first African American mayor of that city. Schmoke served three terms as mayor, and his administration was recognized for its work in community development, public housing improvements, and addressing public health issues through such initiatives as needle exchange and drug treatment programs.

Schmoke received a degree in history from Yale University, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, and graduated from Harvard Law School.

WASHINGTON LAWYER:
Why were you interested in taking on the job of dean at Howard University School of Law?

Kurt Schmoke:
I was thrilled when I heard about the opportunity. I had been an elected official for 17 years in Baltimore as state’s attorney and then as mayor before spending three years in private practice at Wilmer Cutler Pickering LLP. When I heard about the Howard position, it just felt right. It provided me with the opportunity to be involved with legal education matters and public policy issues. But most importantly, I was attracted by the idea of helping to nurture the next generation of leaders for communities around the country and around the world. The university has a slogan, “Leadership for America and the Global Community.” We are trying to train leaders in the law, for America and the global community.

Before beginning the job, did you have goals for what you wanted to accomplish here?
I knew about the tradition and history of the institution, but I didn’t know a great deal about its present, so I asked President Swygert to give me a few months between the time he announced my selection and the time I actually came on so that I could meet individually with the faculty. I came over from Baltimore every day and held individual meetings with all 34 faculty members. That gave me a much better sense of the law school, and by the time I started as dean, I had a few goals in mind.

Short term, I want to raise the visibility of the school, because there are a lot of wonderful things going on that the legal community and the general community do not know about. People know about our law school’s history with Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and William Henry Hastie—all people involved in Brown v. Board of Education—but currently we have people on the faculty who are doing wonderful work in a wide variety of fields.

I also have some short-term goals on academic outcomes, including the first-time bar passage rate of our students. Our students do well in what some people refer to as “eventual” bar passage rate, that is, the pass rate within 24 months after graduation. In that time frame our students do as well as any law school in the country, but the ABA judges you on the first-time passage rate, and I want to increase that first-time passage rate. That is something that we are working on.

What were some of the additional things you found out about the current state of the school?
The faculty is very committed to the tradition of training what a former dean called “social engineers,” leaders in the law who are not only excellent legal scholars but also committed to broader social justice goals. That sense of training social engineers is still here, but it has been redefined. For example, we have a professor who is an expert in antitrust law who published a textbook that is being used by several different law schools around the country. In his antitrust courses he explains how antitrust enforcement helps working people and the poor, so our students get a sense of how antitrust laws serve everybody.

Professor Lateef Mtima is another example. He has established an intellectual property and social justice institute. When people think about intellectual property issues, they may not consider the broader social justice implications, but at Howard we do. He held a conference this year cosponsored by a D.C. law firm. It is another aspect of continuing the mission but redefining it for today’s challenges. The bottom line is that we have people who are still committed to producing social engineers for the needs of the 21st century.

You mentioned that the ABA evaluates schools on the basis of first-time bar passage rate. How do you go about trying to improve that statistic?
First of all, we had to convince everybody at the school that it is an important issue to address, and we have definitely done that. We recognize that although our eventual bar passage rate is fine, we have to work together to improve the first-time passage rate. That means making some improvements in courses such as legal writing. We have to offer students more seminar courses to give them the opportunity to work more intimately with professors. Even though our faculty–student ratio is very good, we need to give students more opportunities for writing and in-depth legal analysis.

We have also created a mentorship program so that our alumni can assist students in states where they are taking the bar. And we are working on offering a voluntary bar preparation course in the second and third years of school. With the approval of the university president, we are able to offer a financial assistance program for those students who can’t afford to take a bar prep course. We want to make sure that money is not a barrier to taking a bar prep course.

Are there any particular bar exams that a majority of students take?
Our students take the bar in 30 different jurisdictions, with Maryland and New York as the most common. We graduate 150 students a year, and 35 to 40 students will take the Maryland bar, 20 to 25 students will take the New York exam, and the remaining students are scattered around the country.

How do you go about raising the visibility of the school among law firms and the greater community?
This year is a great opportunity to do that because we have dedicated the entire academic year, September 2003 to May 2004, to celebrate and commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. That was a very significant moment for the law school because so many of our graduates participated in the Brown cases. Among the events we have held so far are a conference with some of the lawyers who were involved in Brown and speeches by ABA president and former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer and the first African American chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court, Leroy Hassell. These events address issues related to Brown as well as contemporary race issues.

Upcoming events include lectures at Howard by Justice Stephen Breyer and Harvard professor Charles Ogletree. We are also sponsoring a joint conference with Yale University that features two days of seminars here keynoted by Vernon Jordan and two days of seminars in New Haven keynoted by Senator Hillary Clinton. The law school is also collaborating on a conference with the Smithsonian. These types of events celebrate Brown, but also highlight areas the law school’s faculty are currently involved in, generating publicity and coverage by public television, public radio, and newspapers.

We are also trying to get more publicity for professors who have written books to let people know that our teachers are actively involved in legal scholarship and helping to shape legal education’s cutting edge.

Is the effort also helping to increase the number of applications?
The short answer is yes, but that can also be said about a lot of other law schools. The last five years we have seen a steady increase in the number of applications. Admissions tend to run in cycles, but I believe that Howard has seen more than just a reaction to the economy and a tight job market. I think that there has been a significant interest in Howard by students. Last year we had about 2,100 applications for 150 places and a decade ago there were approximately 1,100 to 1,200 applications for those 150 places.

What are students looking for in law schools these days?
It is hard to generalize, because students who come to law school have many different interests. Some come because they really want to be practicing lawyers. Others come because they can’t quite make up their mind what they want to do with themselves and see law school as a place to keep their options open.

There are students who choose Howard for specific reasons. People who are interested in entertainment and sports law come here because we pioneered that field. Thirty years ago one of our professors thought entertainment law was interesting and created a seminar. It has since blossomed into its own field with institutes at various law schools all over the country.

Although people come with a variety of motivations, generally they apply to Howard because they know that in addition to getting a good legal education, they will be infused with a sense of pursuit of social justice. The pursuit of civil rights in its broadest form is infused in everything we teach.

Does Howard offer a clinical program?
Yes. It has been a trend in legal education to offer more hands-on experience. Our clinics are basically of two types: criminal law and alternative dispute resolution, or ADR. One clinic focuses on criminal justice matters, and students actually get to practice in the D.C. Superior Court handling small cases such as misdemeanors and housing violations.

Coming up with ways to settle disputes outside of traditional litigation through ADR has become a big area in the law. Professor Homer La Rue, who runs our ADR clinic, is one of the ABA’s leading voices in that field. Our students love the course, and those who want to become arbitrators or labor negotiators find the ADR skills very helpful.

Where does the ADR clinic take place?
Professor La Rue works with groups like the American Arbitration Association and offers our students’ services to help resolve disputes in landlord–tenant matters or things of that nature.

Are the clinical programs required of students?
No. They are both competitive programs. People who are interested have to submit an essay and have good grades.

Are clinical programs going to continue to grow in law schools?
I think so. We are trying to achieve a balance between the clinical and doctrinal work, but I think the students want more skills work. They want to graduate knowing that they have been trained in exactly what lawyers do on a day-to-day basis beyond researching cases. In fact, I think clinical classes will help us to improve bar passage, because bar exams now try to test for the skills that lawyers use and not just a regurgitation of legal principles.

Is there pressure or lobbying from law firms to add clinical components or somehow to adapt the education process to lawyering skills?

It has been a real mix. If you ask some folks at the ABA section on legal education, they will say that many lawyers believe that there is a complete disconnect between legal education and legal practice and that we at the law schools are operating in our own orbit. I think that has changed a great deal. Law schools have become more responsive, and will continue to be, because firms give us feedback about our students during their summer programs, and we want our students to have a competitive edge. I think it is important not only as a matter of education generally, but to further our graduates’ career opportunities, that we make sure we have a good, solid balance between the skills development work and the doctrinal work.

What effect do U.S. News & World Report–type rankings have on legal education in general?
I come out of a competitive environment in politics where you get judged daily, and every four years people get their opportunity to pass judgment in the election. Being judged, or ranked, is not a bad thing for a school, but personally I question the methodology in the U.S. News system where 40 percent of the grade for a law school is based on reputation among your peers.

That has led to an incredible flood of material from law schools: each dean floods deans at other schools with literature about everything they are doing, and we have web sites highlighting our programs. This ranking system has generated a new paper chase, with deans trying to affect the perception of other deans. It is driven by the need to put yourself on the radar screen of your colleagues, so that when they get a survey they will say, “Oh yes, I remember Tulane has a Caribbean law program.” You don’t know anything about the program, but you remember getting the brochure.

The good aspect of the rankings is that it is helpful to some students trying to decide where they want to go to law school, because it raises questions that they can look into.

Does that rating system affect Howard at all?
It does to some extent. Potential applicants ask me about our rating because they want to make sure that they go to a place that is going to give them a competitive edge when they enter the marketplace. That said, most of our students recognize that the ranking methods say very little about schools below the elite, well-endowed top 10.

How do you judge the University of Washington next to the University of Indiana on a national ranking? To put 187 law schools into a national ranking system and judge schools that are state oriented against schools that are nationally oriented is really difficult. I have found that our students understand that. The rankings have not hurt us in terms of the number of applications we receive, but I know that applicants read the reports and consider it. However, I think they come to Howard for reasons other than our rank in the U.S. News survey.

How does a historically black college like Howard compete for top African American students against places like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford?

We have to compete against not only those particular schools, but also places like Georgetown, which is so much larger than us. Their dean is very proud of the fact that they graduate the second highest number of African American lawyers every year—second to us. That is because Georgetown has 600 students in each class and they might have 70 African American students.
Our class size is only 150, so we have to go out and seek the top students and offer good financial aid. The university is very supportive of us on financial aid, and most of our financial aid packages are based on academic performance. We can offer students with high LSAT scores and high grade point averages substantial scholarships. If they retain their high academic performance in law school, they get to retain that scholarship. Some of our merit-based awards are for full tuition, and for students with heavy undergraduate debt loads that makes a big difference. Consequently, we can offer a good, quality education at a financial bargain. Many students with the highest LSAT scores are still going to end up going to some of our competitors, but the pool of applicants is much bigger than it was 30 years ago.

Has the school tried to broaden its appeal and attract more white, Latino, or Asian students?
We make it very clear that we want to be a school that is diverse in its makeup. I have looked at the application pattern over the last four or five years, and between 12 percent and 15 percent of applications are from white students. Our yield—those who actually come after acceptance—is usually between 8 to 10 percent, and most of them come because of the historic mission of Howard.

We will probably start doing much better among Latino students because we have a core group here now who have gone out and been aggressively recruiting. But our area competitors have also done the same thing, and so I’m not sure what the yield will be there. My sense is that over the next few years the number of whites, Latinos, Asians, Asian–Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans will increase.

It’s hard for me to predict what our white enrollment will be, but students and recent graduates are helping us by letting people know that this is a welcoming place and we are looking to attract as diverse a student body as we can.

What types of practices and size firms do Howard students choose after graduation?
Our law journal students, which would be our top 25 students, tend to go to the same places as law journal students at other schools: they clerk for federal judges or they join large law firms. Many of those students go to New York.

The middle of the class tends to go to public agencies, law enforcement, and the public defender services. After three or four years, a lot of the middle-of-the-class students are practicing in small firms, either by themselves or in two- to three-person law firms, because they are interested in working with average citizens doing employment discrimination, labor law, or civil and criminal justice. They get their training in the large organizations and then move into small private practice.

Do you go out and seek conversations with graduates who are five years out of school to see what they do and what they recommend for the school?
Yes. For example, I’m now reconstituting a board of visitors composed of graduates of the law school and interested friends to help give advice on current developments in the field and how the law school should prepare students for today’s challenges. We want to educate for the future, not for yesterday, and the board of visitors will help with that.

A lot of our graduates attend the annual National Bar Association meeting, so we hold an annual breakfast for them. This past summer I hosted a hospitality suite for our graduates throughout the meeting. Alumni came by and talked about their practices, development issues, and how they can be of help to our current students. When you have a small school like this, your graduates can really make a huge impact just by being mentors. Obviously, I seek funding from them, but I also seek participation with our current students, and we have gotten a very good reaction from them.

Do the D.C. firms recruit here at Howard?
Absolutely! They love the school. They recruit here and our students have really good experiences, but most of our students in the top quarter of our class end up going to New York. I think some of the reason has to do with money. They look at the salaries in New York and look at their debt from college and law school and figure they have a better opportunity to retire their debt quicker going to a big firm in New York. The salary disparity is narrowing, and we see more of our students deciding on D.C. and Maryland firms, but New York still has the biggest lure for them.

What can law schools do to reduce the large debt burden that often forces students to choose the most lucrative offer rather than the one that interests them the most?
I think one of the things you are going to see as a trend around the country is law schools trying to create loan repayment assistance programs. Generally the law schools that have the most involved programs at this time are either the private schools with large endowments or the public institutions that have strong support from their legislatures for loan repayment programs. In order to give our students maximum flexibility and career choice, we are going to have to do something in that area, and we are exploring that now.

These programs are designed to provide incentives for taking mainly public service jobs, correct?
Most loan repayment assistance programs are geared toward those who are going into public service. However, there are other potential reasons for doing it. If you are trying to improve bar passage, you might want to provide an incentive for first-timers by offering them some portion of loan repayment for first-time passage. Those are the types of things that could be considered.

Is an incentive for first-time bar passage something that Howard is considering?
That is something that I am considering. It hasn’t gone beyond an idea floating around in my head, and obviously it’s something for which I would have to get support from the president and the trustees, and also make sure that it is approved by the ABA. More importantly, I would like to be able to join with other schools that are providing the loan assistance for public service.

Is the internationalization of law practices reflected in the courses that are now being offered?
Yes. We offer courses, and encourage people to become involved, in international issues, not only in public and private international law, but in issues like law and agriculture. For instance, one of our professors is an expert on legal issues related to genetically modified food, and has been a consultant to the World Bank on international policies toward this type of food.

One of my goals is to reinvigorate our master’s program. Our faculty voted that our LL.M. should be offered solely to foreign students. Because of immigration changes stemming from September 11, 2001, we have had some disruption in the program. Our experience with the foreign students, however, has been very positive and we want to have between 20 and 30 students a year from around the world. Currently our LL.M. students are from eastern Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, but we would like to get more students in the master’s program.

Also, for the last 10 years we have been operating a program in South Africa. It is a very successful summer program operated by Professor Ziyad Motala. The program accepts about 26 students from other law schools around the country and 14 students from Howard, and it’s run in conjunction with the University of the Western Cape.

Last summer we offered an environmental law program in the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

As a result of the war on terror, have you seen increased demand for courses on immigration or interest among students in law enforcement careers?
I don’t know whether the interest has increased. However, when I arrived here I was surprised to learn that the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and prosecutors’ offices around the country have recruited our students annually. This is not a new phenomenon, and I don’t think that many people were aware that those agencies were successfully recruiting Howard students, but there is a core group of students who are interested in that work.

Among our professors, Professor Lisa Crooms and Professor Frank Wu are very much involved in immigration matters.

September 11 has changed the way in which criminal law is taught, because the discussion of balancing rights—the government’s right to search and seize against citizens’ constitutional protections—has shifted, and our professors have also had to teach the USA PATRIOT Act.

How is your time divided up between fundraising and school policy issues?
I graduated from a law school where students had very little interaction with the dean. We didn’t care if the dean showed up to anything!

Here, because it is a much smaller, more intimate environment, people would like to see the dean available and around for various events. I spend most of my time during the academic year near the law school. That means that if I have to go away on a trip, I try to make it a one-day trip, not a two- or three-day trip. When students are on campus, I try to do a lot of work cultivating prospects for fundraising on the phone and in small meetings.

Between May and August I devote more than half my time to fundraising activities. That’s the time to do that type of work and travel around the country. That way, during the academic year, I can focus on academic matters. As I get settled in here, I would like to teach a course, probably a seminar related to election law or possibly a seminar on leadership studies.

Had you taught before coming here?
Only guest lecturing. I had been a trustee at a number of universities, and that was about as close as I came to being involved in the academic life.

You were a trustee at Yale and served as senior fellow. How did that influence your vision of what you would do here?
At Yale I was the senior fellow for three years and I was on the board for 13 years. I’m currently a trustee at Tuskegee University, and I have been on the board at McDaniel College, a small, liberal arts college in western Maryland, and Loyola College in Baltimore. Those experiences gave me some sense of the importance of the relationship between administrators and faculty. I knew a little bit about the issues of shared governance, but there is an awful lot of learning on the job that has to be done when you become a dean, particularly if you haven’t come up through a faculty.

I’m learning every day, and people have been very patient, which I greatly appreciate. When I really screw up, I can still say, at least during this year, that it was a rookie error and people have been understanding. Next year I won’t be so lucky.

How would you sum up the outlook at Howard University School of Law?
I want folks to be aware that our faculty is doing work in contemporary fields dealing with issues of intellectual property, antitrust, constitutional law, criminal law, and many others, and they are contributing to legal research, just as other law schools are doing. Our students are getting the benefit of our fine faculty and leaving here with a wonderful legal education, but they are still being infused with this sense of being social engineers and wanting to make a difference in their communities. We are proud of our tradition, but we are not resting on our tradition—we are building on it.