Campus Connection

Media Credit: University of Maryland, Baltimore Phoebe A. Haddon was selected to serve as the ninth dean of the law school.

On March 30, the University of Maryland, Baltimore announced the selection of Phoebe Haddon, a leader in tort and constitutional law and legal education from Temple University, to serve as the new dean of the School of Law.  

Haddon will become the school’s first African-American dean and is to succeed Karen Rothenberg, who is returning to the faculty on June 30 after serving ten years as dean.  

After earning her bachelor’s degree from Smith College, Haddon received an LLM from Yale Law School and her Juris Doctor degree from Duquesne University School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Duquesne Law Review.  

Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Joseph F. Weis, Jr. on the Third Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals.  She then practiced law at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C. prior to a faculty appointment at Temple University. 

Her faculty experience includes numerous publications, including as co-author of two casebooks on constitutional and tort law, as well as numerous legal writings on equal protection, jury participation, academic freedom, and diversity.  At Temple, she has taught courses on constitutional and tort law, product liability, and race and ethnicity.  

She has served on numerous legal education organizations, including the Council of the American Bar Association Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, the Society of American Law Teachers, the Association of American Law Schools, and the Law School Admissions Council.  

“Phoebe Haddon is passionate about legal education, about the essential role of innovative and influential scholarship in the continued development of our faculty, and about the School of Law’s vital public service mission,” said UMB President David J. Ramsay in a press release.  “She will build upon the substantial progress of the last decade to attain even greater success in the future.”

Beginning last year, the law school undertook a national search for a dean which yielded five finalists several months ago.  After two of those finalists withdrew themselves from consideration, the remaining three candidates, which included Wendy Collins Perdue from Georgetown University and Linda S. Mullenix from the University of Texas, in addition to Haddon, visited the campus and met with members of the school’s Dean Search Committee.  The Committee’s assessments of the candidates were provided to President Ramsay, who made the final selection of the new dean.  

Additional information about the candidates and selection process is available here:  http://www.law.umaryland.edu/about/dean/index.html.

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