A version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous opening line from her Sonnet 43 keeps rattling around in my head:
“How do I love thee Jacksonville? Let me count the ways.”
My wife, Marla, and I have been warmly welcomed to this special place, experiencing unreserved neighborliness, kindness and hospitality, which in return fuels our affection for our new friends.
So does the appealing community-wide curiosity and joyful pursuit of happiness through knowledge and understanding gained by, for example, engagement with civic education groups.
These include: the best World Affairs Council in the United States, the vibrant local chapter of the James Madison Program in American Ideals, as well as Jacksonville’s cornucopia that serves large appetites for visual and performing arts of all sorts, literature and culinary magic, including a personal favorite of law students and their dean, Jenn’s hot dog stand on the corner of West Forsyth and South Laura streets.
Admittedly, we are relative newcomers from one strange land who sometimes get a bit lost in this other wondrously strange land. It feels like all of Jacksonville immediately helped make us feel at home, overlooking that at times we must seem like Vincent Gambini and Mona Lisa Vito type characters from the great trial practice training film comedy “My Cousin Vinny.”
Dare I say thank y’all?
“Grown men should never confess their love in public, especially when it is the love of an institution; even worse, a law school.”
So wrote the incomparable Yale Law School professor and civil rights champion Owen Fiss in the Coda of “Pillars of Justice,” his inspiring, highly personal reminiscences about a group of legal giants. His teaching and scholarship shape what I understand and continue to learn about the power of law.
My teacher proved unable to follow his own advice, so perhaps this student of his can be forgiven for being unable to suppress the simple truth: I love being in Jacksonville and privileged to work as your law dean on behalf of our remarkable students, faculty, administrators and staff of the Jacksonville University College of Law, as well as the JU community, the city’s extraordinary bench, Bar, civic leaders and the people of Northeast Florida and beyond who our graduates will serve.
The heartfelt pride and gratitude that I hope we share for the success and remarkable progress of the city’s law school is worthy of love sonnets. However, out of respect for poets and readers this writer will rely on pedestrian prose rather than attempting to report on the latest highlights in verse.
This week, we welcomed our fifth class. We met our goal on the button of 110 incoming first year law students in the Class of 2029, plus a small handful of upper-class transfer students. That brings our student body to 215 aspiring lawyers.
Almost 60% are women and a little more than 40% are men. Fifty-three are from Northeast Florida, 88 are from the Sunshine State, and the rest, including transfers, are from 17 states and Canada. Almost two dozen are from Florida State University, a dozen each from the University of Florida and the University of North Florida and two from Flagler.
Four are “Double Dolphins’ from JU, including two from the JU Master of Public Policy program.
Our entering class includes two students whose brothers preceded them at our law school. The age range of the new class is from 19-54 with an average age of 24.9.
Five new students have served in the military. Thirteen have graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. and five MBAs.
Nationally, law school applications were 7% higher than the previous year. Our completed applications were more than 30% higher.
Having spoken with almost every admitted student, I am infatuated with this fifth class. They impress me as intelligent, mature, motivated and good decent people.
Meanwhile at the end of July our graduates who are pursuing careers where a law license is required to work took the Bar examination, most in Tampa for Florida but some in different states. All our recent graduates either have or are in pursuit of worthwhile jobs that put their legal education to good use and fit their abilities and interests. About half of our student body while in school and after graduation are in public service and public interest jobs.
While Bar exam results are not yet available, our students’ hard work will serve them well. They also were well schooled and exceptionally prepared by our faculty and the JU Bar and Academic Success Team for whom every student’s Bar examination readiness is a curricular priority.
Other priorities are professionalism, ethics, practical skills training, technological competence, service, leadership and adaptability. These educational priorities in significant part are from what we hear from the bench, Bar, employers and clients about what law students need to learn and should master.
This past March, our automatic two-year site visit review of our initial accreditation could not have gone better. We expect good news when the American Bar Association decides this month whether to reaffirm our provisional accreditation. In fact, on an accelerated basis we already are scheduled for a site visit review for full accreditation in early March 2027. All indicators are positive.
The exhilarating daily grind toward our ambitious goals occurs amid sad, poignant, satisfying, joyful, uplifting moments alongside the often disheartening, dangerous state of our world.
Yet law school deans are blessed to be with bright, talented young people and resolute coworkers every day. Working in a community like Jacksonville we are reminded constantly that with the help of our neighbors progress is possible.
If we have faith as small as a tiny mustard seed, we can move any mountain. Surely looking at those who we are privileged to work with and those who we teach, we can have more than enough faith to make a positive difference. It matters not if many others do not yet join us. Our faith in what we believe to be right and our faith in our mission will save us.
If we recall against all odds how much throughout the fitful imperfect history of humankind even one person, or even a dozen people, or waves of dozens and dozens of communities of people can accomplish in the pursuit of equal justice and the common good, then we can justifiably hope to continue the sometimes gradually, other times tectonically, upward arc of progress.
William Butler Yeats expressed our humble gratitude to the people of Jacksonville poetically, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends / And say my glory was I had such friends.”