Faculty Presentation Day

Faculty Presentation Day
Wednesday, April 2, 2008

With great pleasure, I introduce New York Law School’s fourth Faculty Presentation Day. By now we are Faculty Presentation Day veterans. We are accustomed to coming together for one day, every second year, to showcase the thinking of our school. Faculty and students present their work—making the effort to offer serious and subtle ideas in an accessible and enjoyable format—and our whole community takes part in the discussions these presentations generate.

New York Law School is at a special time in its history. Our new building is rising as we speak. We will soon have classrooms and public spaces of a size and quality unmatched in our history, and we plan to complete our physical transformation by comprehensively renovating the buildings we already have as well.

But a school is not a building, and the marvelous physical plant we look forward to must be a starting point rather than an ending point. In this building we need to continue to develop deeper understanding of the law we already have, and to shape legal responses to the new legal problems we face. That is the work of scholarship, and Faculty Presentation Day showcases the wonderful scholarly work our faculty and students are doing.

Scholarship informs teaching, and teaching, of course, is vitally important in and of itself. Today American law schools are caught up in a debate over how we can best prepare our students to make their way in the world into which they will all soon graduate—a world of high technology, demanding clients, sharp competition, and profound social and ethical challenges. We want New York Law School to be at the forefront of this process of reinventing legal education, and Faculty Presentation Day is a chance for us to highlight our work and thoughts about education as well as about doctrine.

I’m proud to say that Faculty Presentation Day has become a part of the exciting life of our school. We invite you to join us on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 in this community of achievement.

Dean Richard A. Matasar