DEAN DANIELLE M. CONWAY SERVES AS PANEL SPEAKER ON DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
August 2023 — Penn State Dickinson Law Dean Danielle M. Conway spoke at UPMC’s Corporate Legal Department quarterly meeting held in Pittsburgh on August 9, 2023. Michael Feeney ’01, senior associate counsel, vice president of claims and litigation at UPMC, invited Dean Conway to discuss the recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action involving the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard, affirmative action, DEI efforts, and antiracism.
UPMC’s Cultivating Diversity & Inclusion Council hosted the discussion. In addition to Dean Conway, panelists included Vice Dean Jerry Dickinson, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; University of Pittsburgh School of Law’s Sally Ann Semenko Endowed Chair and Professor of Law David A. Harris; UPMC Health Plan President and CEO Diane Holder; and Crystal Clark MD, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, UPMC Community HealthChoices.
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. Dean Conway’s scholarly agenda and speeches have focused on, among other areas, advocating for public education and for actualizing the rights of marginalized groups and promoting systemic equity in legal education and the profession. Under her leadership, Dickinson Law’s Antiracist Development Institute (ADI) was created to facilitate the dismantling of structures that scaffold systemic racial inequality by using a systems design approach focused on implementing antiracist practices, processes, and policies throughout organizations.
Dean Conway is the co-recipient of the inaugural Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Impact Award, which recognized her work in co-curating the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project, a webpage for law deans, faculty, and the public that contains resources and information related to addressing systemic racism in law and legal education. Dean Conway is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of the AALS Executive Committee, and a director of the AccessLex Institute.