Message From the Dean

Dear CUNY Law community,

Welcome to the start of the 2024-25 academic year!

A new academic year brings with it tremendous energy and optimism, and I hope you all feel that as we come together. After a summer of planning and preparation led by our Admissions team, Orientation starts on August 19—I thank everyone involved in that effort, as I look forward to welcoming over 220 new 1Ls soon. And we look forward to welcoming our returning 2Ls, 3Ls, and 4Ls soon thereafter, hearing about summer internships, courses for the fall semester, and more.

During the past year, I continued to spend a lot of time listening to the hopes and priorities of community members, both in my capacity as dean and as a member of the strategic planning committee. Thank you to each and every person who joined all of us in that endeavor to mark the successes of the law school and to identify goals and priorities to pursue in the next five years. I look forward to the coming year, as we start to implement key initiatives in our strategic plan and continue to move forward with our mission of law in service of human needs.

The core of what we do is excellent teaching and learning. We celebrate our faculty’s teaching, scholarly work, and advocacy; our students, whose passion, intellect, and experience shape discourse in our classrooms and beyond; and our staff, whose dedication and expertise advance our mission. In this community letter, I’m sharing some of the other great work from the 2023-24 academic year. As we often find ourselves focused on our everyday work and “to do” lists, we sometimes lose sight of all that we’ve accomplished. Early this summer, I asked leaders of different areas in the law school to share things that they and their colleagues did that were not necessarily part of their everyday work, but that stood out in the last year. Below, I’m sharing just a small slice of what they shared with me.

During the 2023-24 academic year, we:

• Celebrated the 40^th anniversary of CUNY Law School, which opened its doors in September 1983
• Continued to lead the nation as the most racially diverse law school in the nation—both in terms of our student body and in terms of our faculty—and maintained high percentages of LGBTQ2IA+ students and first-generation students
• Welcomed new leadership in Academic Affairs, Student Affairs and Enrollment Management and Institutional Advancement, and welcomed four new full-time faculty members and over a dozen new staff colleagues
• Secured CUNY approval for the Institute on Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace, led by Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee
• With the revival of the W. Haywood Burns Chair in Human and Civil Rights, benefited from the programs and classes led by Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who served as the 2023 Burns Chair
• Built and launched a completely redesigned website with improved accessibility, user experience, and navigation, which includes resources for the community, an online directory, and microsites for various projects and programs at CUNY Law
• Advanced our commitment to racial justice through programming, courses, and leadership in initiatives including the Law School Anti-Racist Coalition
• Continued building the pathbreaking First Impressions Youth Legal Collaborative, designed to be a model for youth civics engagement programs across the state of New York
• Made significant progress in modernizing many of our systems and processes
• Held a CUNY-wide financial aid conference to ensure best practices and professional development
• Expanded our support of alumni providing no-cost legal services through increased support from elected officials for the Community Legal Resource Network
• Secured a two-year grant to expand our Pipeline to Justice program and consider how to create a replicable model for other institutions to follow
• Secured millions of dollars in external support from foundations, including to support the work of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility clinic and the Institute on Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace
• Expanded our wellness programming with Trauma Informed Yoga and other offerings for the entire community
• Entered into a three-year contract with Kaplan to provide no-cost post-graduation bar preparation courses, and curricular support for our bar preparation classes
• Hosted and co-sponsored OutSummit, bringing together activists from many nations to address legal and social attitudes about sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex issues globally
• Moved up the timeline for publishing course schedules and registration, enabling students to plan their courses well in advance
• Hosted over 100 academics at the third annual Workshop for AAPI-MENA Women in Legal Academia
• Completed a strategic planning process, the first one for the law school in nearly a decade, to create a roadmap of our priorities for the coming years
• Sent a far higher percentage of our recent graduates into public interest and social justice lawyering jobs than any other law school in the nation

And that just scratches the surface of all that we did in the last year!
The 40th anniversary of CUNY Law last year offered us an opportunity to reflect on all that we have accomplished over the past four decades; our commitment to diversifying legal education and the legal profession; our commitment to educating and training thoughtful, ethical, passionate, and compassionate social justice lawyers; and our future as a community of learners, activists, thinkers, and advocates. I look forward to collaborating on these and other efforts to build, sustain, and lift the law school and each member of our community. Thank you for all that you bring to this endeavor.

Sincerely,

Sudha Setty
Dean and Professor of Law