Finalists for Berkeley Law (Boalt) Deanship

The four external finalists to be Dean of Boalt are: Christopher Edley from Harvard; Edward Rubin from Penn; Tom Sullivan from Minnesota; and Stephen Yeazell from UCLA. (Yeazell is also the sole external finalist for the Cornell Deanship; there are two insiders in contention there as well.)

This is a surprising list, and for one reason having nothing to do with the quality of these candidates: a law school whose prior Dean resigned over allegations of sexual assault would have been keen, one might have thought, to have some female candidates for the Deanship; and a law school which has a reputation (just or unjust, I do not know) for discriminating against women in hiring and tenure (a law school which even lost a law suit on the latter count) would have been especially keen to have female candidates for Dean.

But for all I know, no credible female candidates were available. Edley, who is African-American, is a prominent administrative law scholar. Rubin, who also works in administrative law, taught at Boalt for many years, before taking early retirement and moving to Penn, when his wife got a job in that area. Sullivan, an antitrust scholar, has become something of a "professional" dean, serving at Arizona, Minnesota, and elsewhere, and earning high marks from all the faculty I've ever heard from at those schools. (Sullivan had the misfortune to serve as Dean at Minnesota when Minnesota's three most prominent faculty--Daniel Farber, Philip Frickey, and Suzanna Sherry--all left, through no fault of Sullivan's; Farber and Frickey are now at Boalt.) Yeazell is a prominent scholar in civil procedure.

(Disclosure: someone who had obviously not read this blog or my Green Bag columns had nominated me for the Boalt deanship during the summer [top law schools will often have a pool of several dozen deanship candidates early on in the process]. Boalt's head-hunting firm had also contacted me even earlier, to solicit my nominations for Dean candidates. My two lead nominations [one man, one woman] didn't make the final four.)