Randy Hertz, director of clinical and advocacy programs and professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law, has been named chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. He will serve a one-year term.
The ABA section provides leadership and services to the legal education community. Its governing council is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the accrediting agency for law schools in the United States.
“This is an exciting time to step into the position of section chair,” Hertz said. “Last year’s Carnegie Foundation report on legal education has spurred a new wave of curricular innovations, and a group of law schools, including NYU, is currently working with the Foundation on a variety of follow-up measures.”
Hertz has served on the section’s council since 2000, and has played a leadership role in developing strategies to meet the needs of legal education in the future. He chaired the section’s Special Committee to Devise Outcome Measures to Assess Law Schools, which has worked for the past year to consider new criteria to evaluate law school performance. The special committee’s final report recommended revising the ABA’s current law school accreditation standards to reduce their focus on input measures (how a law school is investing its resources) and place greater emphasis on outcome measures (how successfully a law school has imparted knowledge to and enhanced the capacities of its students).
“The section will be implementing this important shift in the coming year,” Hertz said.
Hertz was a member of the section’s Task Force on Accreditation Policies in 2006-07, and was the reporter for the section’s Commission to Review the Substance and Process of ABA Accreditation of American Law Schools (Wahl Commission) in the mid-1990s. He was a consultant in 1990-92 to the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap (MacCrate Task Force), which produced a major report defining new expectations for legal education.
A member of NYU School of Law’s faculty since 1985, Hertz has been editor-in-chief of the Clinical Law Review since 1994, serves on the board of trustees of Vermont Law School, and is a member of the New York State Bar Association Committee to Review the New York Bar Examination. His contributions to legal education have been recognized with awards from the Association of American Law Schools, New York University, the ABA, and the New York City Bar Association.
Before joining the NYU faculty, Hertz was with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he practiced in the Juvenile Division, the Felony Trial Division, and the Appeals Division. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice Robert F. Utter of the Washington Supreme Court in 1979-80, and has been an adjunct instructor at Catholic University Law School and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Hertz received his law degree from Stanford Law School in 1979 and his bachelor of arts degree from Carleton College in 1976.