Law School Report

UB 2020

Building up, reaching out
The Law School will play a major role in the University's civic engagement and public policy initiative

From left to right, Dr. Kate Foster, director of the Regional Institute, and Laura Mangan, special assistant to the Law School dean for civic engagement and public policy. The Regional Institute will be one of the flagship tenants of a third, downtown campus located in the UB Downtown Gateway – the former M.Wile Building.

The Law School is an integral element of UB 2020, the University at Buffalo's far-reaching plan to expand, improve academically, and achieve national prominence. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the segment of the strategic plan focused on civic engagement and public policy.

Now Law School faculty and administrators are being challenged to think in new ways about how their scholarship and service can be leveraged to improve the quality of life in Western New York, New York State and beyond.

UB Law has a long history of making a difference in the community. Such strengths as the school's extensive clinical legal education program, the Regional Institute, and the interdisciplinary Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy have long been a positive force in the community, particularly in the area of public policy. So the Law School is in a position of leadership as the University looks to identify and build on such work.

The new focus on civic engagement and public policy, says former Dean Nils Olsen, "has an educational as well as a scholarly component. It also pulls together a lot of other activities that the University engages in previously without much coordination or self-identification.

"This is an area in which people are already extraordinarily engaged, obviously," Olsen says. "We have a terrific body of scholarship that demonstrates that we are committed to civic engagement and public policy. The idea is to really integrate this into the life of the University, not only its scholarly life but its engagement with the community."

Dr. Kate Foster, director of the Regional Institute, a research and policy center that is now a unit of the Law School, identifies four ways the Institute carries out this strategic strength:

• Contract work for regional clients in government, business and foundations. Recent examples are a study for Erie County on alternatives to incarceration and a tourism management plan for seven Southtowns municipalities to assess and develop their tourism potential.
• Research and policy studies addressing topics in regional governance, economies and demographic change. These include MacArthur Foundation-funded work on "building resilient regions" as well as the award-winning policy briefs series highlighting regional policy topics.
• Online information resources for media, public officials, scholars, grant writers and other regional interest groups. Prominent among these are the institute's extensive Regional Knowledge Network offering data, maps, contact lists and studies, and findings of the ongoing State of the Region performance indicators project.
• Public forums and conferences that directly engage policy-makers and the general public. These include the October 2007 Symposium on Change in Buffalo Niagara and its Region's Edge series highlighting issues at the international border.

Foster notes also that as UB expands geographically, the Regional Institute will be one of the flagship tenants of a third, downtown campus located in the UB Downtown Gateway— the former M. Wile Building and the newest building on the growing downtown campus, located at 77 Goodell St.

With the appointment of a former longtime Baldy Center administrator as special assistant to the Law School dean for civic engagement and public policy, the Law School expands its role in this important focus of the UB 2020 effort. In her new role, Laura Mangan will facilitate, coordinate and at times help implement applied faculty research involving civic engagement and public policy.

"Faculty research and scholarship is often informed by pressing or persistent concerns," Mangan says. "We want to encourage faculty to continue to do this kind of research. We are a public research university, and part of our mission must be to serve the public."

Mangan has the multifaceted responsibility of coordinating work in civic engagement and public policy throughout the University. In the position, she will work in cooperation with and under the guidance of the Faculty Advisory Committee overseen by the Deans' Coordinating Committee.

She notes that the strategic strength has five initial areas of focus:

• Creating resilient communities and sustainable economies.
• Reaching across borders.
• Improving public health.
• Advancing pre-K through 16 education.
• Preparing leaders in public policy.

In those broad categories, she and her colleagues will conduct a census of current faculty research and teaching, and will bring together groups of faculty from multiple disciplines in each research area. One measure of success, she said, will be the fertile cross-pollination, so familiar in the Baldy Center, that takes place when scholars in different disciplines find common interest in scholarship and research projects. This should lead to more external grants coming to UB; many research grants are targeted for interdisciplinary endeavors.

"Civic engagement is not going to be for everybody," Mangan acknowledges. "Members of the law faculty could be involved in other strategic strengths. Getting the University as a whole to reconsider the value of applied research is one of the great challenges and opportunities of this effort."

Nevertheless, she said, Dean Olsen has been a champion of civic engagement and public policy in the Law School and University-wide, and much recent and current activity in the Law School fit nicely into this area.

The "service learning" work of the Law School's 10 legal clinics, for example, "serves mostly the local community, but what they do sometimes has national and international applications."

Other Law School examples of civic engagement:

• Law students in Professor Teresa Miller's classes have documented on video the stories of survivors of domestic violence and the experiences of inmates at Attica State Prison.
• Professor Isabel Marcus' longtime research on women's international human rights and domestic violence, including exchange programs with scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, and planned training for domestic violence prosecutors in Latin America.
• A planned 2009 interdisciplinary conference on water quality and boundary issues to coincide with the centennial of the Boundary Waters Treaty between the United States and Canada, in partnership with Ontario's Brock University and other local academic institutions.
• The extensive work of the Regional Institute in resourcing and influencing policy-makers in local and state governments.
• Conferences on public emergencies; law, Buddhism and social change; and other cross-disciplinary matters of public importance.
• Even a monthly report on Community Action & Student Engagement, offering law students opportunities to engage with the community in everything from human rights internships to providing blankets for homeless residents.