Jethro K. Lieberman

Vice President, Academic Publishing
Professor of Law

Returning in July 2008 after a year's sabbatical, Jethro K. Lieberman became Vice President, Academic Publishing, and Founding Publisher and Editorial Director of Tribeca Square Press, the new publishing arm of New York Law School.

From 2000 to 2007, he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, overseeing the School’s academic activities, including academic advising, course scheduling, registration, and academic record keeping. Highlights of this period include coping with the World Trade Center bombing (during the Fall 2001 semester) and its aftermath and a New York City subway strike, the development of online course registration and student access to online transcripts and records, an overhaul and integration of course offerings to support the growth of the Law School’s academic centers, and the creation of a new first-year syllabus to take effect in the next two to three years.

Professor Lieberman joined the faculty in 1985. His major courses have been Constitutional Law and an advanced writing course. From time to time he has taught courses in administrative law, legal method, and law and society. In 2008 he is teaching a new course, Explaining the Law to the Public, in which students write original monographs to be published in book form. From 1985 to 2007, he also served as Director of the Writing Program, overseeing the staff and adjunct faculty who administered and taught the first-year writing courses.

In starting a new publishing venture for the Law School, Professor Lieberman will be returning to his roots in writing, journalism, and publishing. A student journalist in his undergraduate years at Yale, he graduated in 1964 with a B.A. in politics and economics. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1967, he practiced law for six years, including a stint of three years' active duty in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, followed by practice in the area of antitrust and trade regulation at a large Washington D.C. law firm. In the early 1970s he moved to New York, where he served as Vice President and General Counsel of Stein and Day, a trade book publisher. But the call of journalism proved strong, and in 1973 he became Founding Editor of the Legal Affairs Department at Business Week. In his nearly ten years at the magazine, he wrote six cover stories, including one on litigiousness and another on the direction of antitrust policy.

In 1995, Professor Lieberman earned a Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University where for several years thereafter as Adjunct Professor of Political Science he taught an undergraduate constitutional law course.

Along the way, Professor Lieberman has also pursued a career as an author. His first book was published when he was a third-year law student, and since then he has written and edited more than 25 books published by major American publishers, including W. W. Norton, Random House, Harper & Row, West, Basic Books, Harcourt Brace, McGraw-Hill, Avon, Penguin, and the University of California Press. Two of his books, The Litigious Society (Basic Books, 1981) and The Enduring Constitution (West and Harper & Row, 1987), have won the American Bar Association’s top literary prize, the Silver Gavel, and one of his books, The Complete CB Handbook (Avon, 1976), which he wrote in three weeks during the height of the CB radio craze, wound up on a Publisher’s Weekly best-sellers list. His books also cover legal ethics, business and constitutional law, and writing, including Crisis at the Bar (Norton, 1978), A Practical Companion to the Constitution: How the Supreme Court Has Ruled on Issues from Abortion to Zoning (University of California Press, 1999), and The Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well (University of California Press, revised paperback edition, 2002).

In his new role as head of the Office of Academic Publishing, he oversees the New York Law School Law Review, the Program in Law & Journalism, and Tribeca Square Press. The Office of Academic Publishing will explore new forms of publishing, including electronic journals and new book series.

The father of two grown children, Professor Lieberman lives in Ardsley, New York with his wife Jo. In his increasingly scarce spare time, he publishes occasional pamphlets as proprietor of a private press. His introduction to type and printing began early in his childhood: he learned to set type at the age of nine in his father’s print shop. He still maintains type and presses at his home, and is the proud owner of one of the world’s most famous printing presses still in private hands, the Kelmscott/Goudy Albion iron hand press, originally used by William Morris in 1896 to publish the book known today as the Kelmscott Chaucer, and brought to the United States in 1924 by Frederic W. Goudy, the preeminent American type designer.