Law.com profiles Dean Danielle M. Conway as she becomes AALS president

CARLISLE and UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.— Penn State Dickinson Law Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law Danielle M. Conway was recently profiled by Law.com, which shared news of her election as president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and outlined her theme for the 2027 Annual Meeting: “Emancipate. Academic. Freedom.”

“I thought deeply about this theme because of the political landscape that higher education is in, with pundits having so much to say about the ills of higher education without acknowledging that higher education is one of the primary organs for practicing democratic principles,” Conway says in the story.

She later adds, “We're asking our colleagues in our membership to wrestle and grapple with this theme because one person shouldn't have all the answers. What this theme has been structured to do is to really ask the questions.”

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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 Penn State 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, Penn State 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 current president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). She is the co-recipient of the inaugural AALS Impact Award, which recognized her work in co-curating the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project, a webpage for law deans, faculty, staff, 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, a director of the AccessLex Institute, and a 27-year veteran of the United States Army, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.