A pro bono life - law school dean Barbara Bader Aldave

Progressive, The, May, 1998 by Colman McCarthy

Long before I visited St. Mary's University Law School in San Antonio a few months back, I knew of its reputation for scrappiness. For nearly ten years, St. Mary's has been a haven for morality-based legal education. To this university, turning out attorneys is meaningless unless they have been exposed to the ideal of restorative justice and the practice of lawyering for clients the bar usually ignores. This isn't a hothouse school offering specialties in acquisition and merger law, boardroom law, or loophole law. It is--or was--one of the leading public-interest law schools in the country.

Founded in 1927 and currently serving 750 students, St. Mary's was headed, last fall, by Barbara Bader Aldave. Aldave was one of the few female law deans in America and the only one in the nine Texas law schools. After her 1989 appointment, she began to reshape an institution that had processed students as if they were slabs of cheese at Velveeta Law School hoping to make partner one day at Cheddar, Mozzarella, & Brie. She created the Center for Legal and Social Justice, a thriving enclave with five clinics and clients ranging from battered women to homeless immigrants.

All this broke with the school's conservative South Texas past, as did Aldave's decision to put in new courses in public-interest law, environment law, and alternative dispute resolution. The school also began to offer a course in capital-punishment law, with students doing pro bono work on Texas's death row--a busy place, since Texas leads the nation in state killings. Minority admissions rose. The year before Aldave's appointment, minority enrollment in the first-year class totaled 7.5 percent. By 1997, it had soared to 43 percent.

These changes did not go unnoticed. In 1997, the American Bar Association honored St. Mary's with its "Public Interest Law School of the Year" award. St. Mary's work also received awards from the Association of American Law Schools and the Clinical Legal Education Association. The Texas Observer said that St. Mary's clinical education program was "unparalleled in the state of Texas."

In a 1995 speech at Marquette University, Aldave reflected on her first five years: "While I was interviewing for the deanship, I was entirely honest about the changes I hoped to effect. The law school had been, by anyone's standards, a conservative institution. The curriculum was extremely limited, and most of the course of study was mandatory. In an area of the country in which Hispanics constitute the majority, the student body was almost exclusively white and male. A dress code and strict disciplinary rules were in effect. The place reminded me of a military camp."

In turning around a school that used to be, in the words of the San Antonio Express News, "a nuts-and-bolts training ground for corporate lawyers," Aldave made enemies. One of her harshest critics was the former dean, Ernest Raba. He charged that St. Mary's had become "a fungus of neo-Satanism and neo-humanism." Another critic was Allan Parker, founder of the Christian Coalition in San Antonio. In December, he told the National Catholic Reporter, "Barbara would be a very good dean at a liberal feminist organization.... I think Barbara ignored the practical aspects of law. Doing a corporate contract is not as much fun as suing a landlord over racial discrimination."

After years of anti-Aldave grousing, which included attacks from some trustees and faculty members who longed for the old days, the dean was finished. University president, John Moder, a Marianist priest, announced Aldave's termination last October. He cited the "stress and strain" brought on by the dean's changes. "Stress did not create a pleasant environment in which to work," he said.

In my conversations with Barbara Aldave, I found myself wondering, how did this humane, risk-taking lover of long shots--she is anti-death penalty, pro-affirmative action--last almost a decade? And in Texas?

The answer is obvious: Aldave provided a service, both to the students who enrolled and to the clients they helped in their clinics after graduation.

"No one other than a rich individual or a corporation can afford legal services," Aldave says. "In Texas, I know that more than 90 percent of the people can't afford to hire a lawyer. What we need are lawyers willing to go out and work for clients of modest means, delivering services to people who have a desperate need for them. Texas needs immigration lawyers, social security specialists, and--everywhere--domestic-relations lawyers. In San Antonio, the minimum retainer among most lawyers for a divorce case is $5,000."

Aldave's interest in promoting public-interest law at St. Mary's contrasts sharply with the indifference found at other sites of legal training. In October, in a story titled "Why Most Law Schools Are Failing Public-Interest Law," the National Jurist magazine reported the bleakness: "A survey of 168 law schools revealed that 66 percent do little to promote public-interest law, earning Ds or Fs in an evaluation of their financial and institutional support, public-interest opportunities for students, and job-placement efforts."