The Law School’s graduating Class of 2010 has honored two of its faculty — Lior Strahilevitz, for teaching excellence; and Saul Levmore, for improving the quality of student life.
Strahilevitz teaches Privacy and Property courses, and has taught seminars on Property Theory, Trade Secrets, and Law and the Economic Development of Chicago; Levmore was dean of the Law School for all but the last two quarters of the third–year law students’ time there.
In honoring Strahilevitz, students said they admired him for enlivening his classes and making complicated subject matters easier to understand. “The people voting for him tended to praise his straightforward use of the Socratic method and lucid presentation of the class material,” said Nick Kodes, a third–year law student who led the faculty awards process.
Strahilevitz, who joined the Law School faculty in 2002, also won the Graduating Students Class Award in 2005.
“My approach is to only teach issues that I can get myself interested in and excited about–and the more I’ve learned over the years, the easier it’s been to get excited,” he said. ”If I have a hard time mustering up curiosity about a topic, I will never be able to convince the students that they should be interested in it.”
His teaching strategy focuses on ensuring that every student in a class enriches the discussion. “I do my best to create a natural conversation out of what is at first blush a jarring and bizarre interaction—96 students listening in on a Socratic dialogue between a professor and a student,” he said.
Striving daily for these worthwhile interactions has a long–term reward: Seeing how much students have grown between the first day of their classes and graduation day, he said.
For Levmore, the Class of 2010 expressed an appreciation for his trademark dry humor and sarcasm, affectionately parodied in this year’s Law School Musical, but students admired him most for his leadership of the Law School. “Students praised his work as dean in terms of accessibility to the student body and straightforward approach to many issues facing the school,” Kodes said.
Levmore joined the Law School faculty in 1998 and was dean from 2001–09. He has taught torts, corporations, non–profit organizations, comparative law, public choice, corporate tax, commercial law, insurance and contracts. Improving student life was a goal while he dean, he said.
“I wish I had been a student here, and maybe even a member of the Class of 2010, and I tried, perhaps subconsciously, to help make it a law school that I would have wanted to attend, along with classmates and friends who were different from me,” he said.
—Adapted from piece written by Lynn Safranek, Law School Office of Communications
