DEAN CONWAY AND MULTIPLE FACULTY TO PARTICIPATE IN RUTGERS LAW ANTIRACISM SYMPOSIUM AS PART OF DICKINSON LAW’S COMMITMENT TO FIGHTING SYSTEMIC RACISM

Conway, Gaudion, Saidman-Krauss, GroomeMarch 2021 — Deans Danielle M. Conway, Amy Gaudion, and Bekah Saidman-Krauss, and Professor Dermot Groome will participate in Rutgers Law School’s April 2021 Race and the Law Review Symposium entitled Building an Anti-Racist Curriculum and Law School. Their remarks and multiple law review articles explain how Dickinson Law’s faculty is operationalizing its unanimous resolution to develop an antiracist curriculum.

On Monday, April 12, which is the first day of the Symposium, Dean Conway will participate on a panel entitled The Role of Law School Deans. Dean Conway will join four of her sister deans to discuss the role of deans and administrators in leading an Antiracist law school Dean Conway’s presentation is based on her co-authored Rutgers article entitled Building an Antiracist Law School: Inclusivity in Admissions and Retention of Diverse Students—Leadership Determines DEI Success.

On Wednesday, April 14, Associate Deans Amy Gaudion and Bekah Saidman-Krauss as well as Professor Dermot Groome will present the content of three independently authored papers as part of a panel entitled Building an Antiracist Curriculum. Their papers and presentations focus on different aspects of building an antiracist law school, legal academy, and legal profession through leadership, vision priorities, and transformational diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused admissions:

These articles and presentations are part of a historic Symposium that seeks to address what an Antiracist legal education entails. The Symposium features five panels over two days; legal educators, law students, policy makers, and the public are encouraged to attend virtually and be part of this vital work. Advance registration is available here.

Danielle M. Conway is the Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. A leading expert in procurement law, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property law, Dean Conway joined Dickinson Law after serving for four years as dean of the University of Maine School of Law and 14 years on the faculty of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law, where she was the inaugural Michael J. Marks Distinguished Professor of Business Law. Prior to her deanships, Conway was a member of the faculties at the Georgetown University Law Center and the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. She also served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia and later as Chair in Law at LaTrobe University, Faculty of Law & Management. Dean Conway is the author or editor of six books and casebooks as well as numerous book chapters, articles, and essays. Her scholarly agenda and speeches have focused on, among other areas, advocating for public education and for actualizing the rights of marginalized groups, including Indigenous Peoples, minoritized people, and members of rural communities. Dean Conway is the co-recipient of the inaugural Association of American Law Schools’ Impact Award, which honors individuals who have had a significant positive impact on legal education or the legal profession. Dean Conway was recognized for her work in establishing the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project. Launched in June 2020, the project is a webpage for law deans, faculty, and the public that contains resources and information related to addressing racism in law and legal education. In 2016, Dean Conway retired from the U.S. Army in the rank of lieutenant colonel after 27 years of combined active, reserve, and national guard service.

Professor Amy Gaudion is the associate dean for academic affairs and professor of lawyering skills at Penn State Dickinson Law. Her research and teaching interests focus on cybersecurity, national security law, and civilian-military relations. Her recent scholarship includes The Role of Satellites and Smart Devices: Data Surprises and Security, Privacy, and Regulatory Challenges, 123 Penn St. L. Rev. 591 (2019) (co-authored with Anne Toomey McKenna and Jenni L. Evans), as well as Defending Your Country . . . and Gender – Legal Challenges and Opportunities Confronting Women in the Military, a chapter in Women, Law and Culture: Conformity, Contradiction and Conflict (Jocelynne A. Scutt ed., 2016) (Palgrave Macmillan). Professor Gaudion leads the Law School’s national security and cybersecurity programs, and she established an annual cyberspace exercise in collaboration with the U.S. Army War College.

Bekah Saidman-Krauss is Associate Dean for Admissions and Financial Aid at Penn State Dickinson Law.  She earned her B.A., cum laude, in comparative religion at Smith College, where she also worked as a research assistant for the Chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She later earned her J.D. from Penn State Dickinson Law, where she served as comments editor for the Penn State Law Review and was inducted into the Woolsack Honor Society. During her time at Dickinson Law, Saidman-Krauss worked for Judge Thomas I. Vanaskie of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and for Judge Yvette Kane of the Middle District of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Dickinson Law, she joined Troutman Pepper’s (formerly Pepper Hamilton) Philadelphia office as a litigation associate but eventually returned to her law school alma mater to oversee the admissions operation. As the Associate Dean for Admissions & Financial Aid at Dickinson Law, Dean Saidman-Krauss has played an instrumental role in seating Penn State Dickinson Law’s diverse and highly credentialed entering classes.  Her many contributions include redrafting Dickinson Law’s application to include optional questions that broaden the law school’s definition of diversity to include—in addition to women and racial and ethnic minorities—adult learners, individuals with disabilities, first generation college and graduate students, members of the LGBTQ community, and veterans.  In 2016, Saidman-Krauss received the Outstanding Service Award from Penn State’s Commission for LGBTQ Equity in recognition of her efforts to improve the climate of diversity and inclusion for LGBTQ-identified individuals at Penn State. In 2017, she was invited to join the Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Subcommittee of the Law School Admissions Council’s (LSAC) Diversity Committee and helped to plan the inaugural LSAC Equality Conference, which focused on building, maintaining, and promoting LGBTQ+ inclusive environments in law schools nationally.

Professor Dermot Groome is a Professor of Law and the Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Penn State Dickinson Law. Much of his teaching, scholarship, and service focus on emerging areas of human rights and international criminal law and draw upon his deep expertise and experiences. After starting his career in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office where he was a member of the Sex Crimes Unit and after working in Jamaica, W.I. on issues of community development, human rights, and children’s rights, Professor Groome worked in Cambodia. While in Cambodia, he served as a Legal Advisor to the International Human Rights Law Group, helped lead an investigation into a 1997 attack on peaceful protestors and drafted a report for the UN Security Council, helped the Cambodia Defender’s Project and Legal Aid of Cambodia investigate deaths in police custody, worked on issues related to the incarceration of children, and wrote a draft juvenile criminal procedure code. Professor Groome subsequently spent over 11 years as a senior war crimes prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He investigated and drafted the first genocide indictment against a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević, and was the Senior Trial Attorney for the Bosnia indictment. In total, Groome led the prosecution of five international criminal trials including the case against Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of over 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. He led eight large complex international investigations of senior military, political, and police officials. Groome’s cases all included crimes of sexual violence against women, men, and children. He was instrumental in the development of Joint Criminal Enterprise, a theory of criminal responsibility often used to assess the culpability of senior officials for the crimes committed by their subordinates. Two documentaries have been made about Professor Groome’s cases: The Trial of Ratko Mladić (PBS/Frontline 2019) and Crimes Before the ICTY: Višegrad (UN TV 2017).