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ISSUE V. 9 |
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FEATURE OF THE MONTH |
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CEB
Profile of Mary Kay Kane Business Employment
Law 1 Employment
Law 2 Family
Law General Interest
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ARCHIVE OF PAST ISSUES |
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TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE |
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CEB Profile of Mary Kay Kane |
A Lifetime of Law & Learning
by Jane McDermott
As the daughter of the only lawyer in her working-class neighborhood of Detroit, Mary Kay Kane grew up discussing points of law in mock trials around the family dinner table. A history buff, she favored Napoleon and William I—people who codified the legal systems of their day. It should come as no surprise that she would become known, through her teaching and writing, as one of the country’s most respected names in civil procedure. Mary Kay Kane is the Chancellor and Dean of UC Hastings College of the Law and she is a new addition to the CEB Governing Committee. (The CEB Governing Committee consists of nine voting members, four of whom are appointed by the State Bar of California. The rest are appointed by the University of California.)
Credentialed as an English teacher, Dean Kane found high school teaching lacking and considered her options, including graduate school. "I didn't know that I wanted to become a lawyer; I knew that I wanted to teach people who wanted to be there. My father loved the law and I wanted to do something that would give me that same sense. I decided to give law school a try and I ended up falling in love with the law."
Entering law school and coming of age at a time when opportunities for women were rapidly evolving, Dean Kane has been a coincidental contributor to the advancement of women. Of the 428 entering students in her first-year law class at the University of Michigan in 1968, only 19 of them were women. (For comparison, currently about 56% of the Hastings student body is female.) Hers was the first class of women to be permitted to reside in the hallowed Law Quadrangle’s Lawyers Club residence hall.
It would be with the male fellow law students that she watched the televised lottery for the Vietnam War draft in 1969. Her immunity from this potential career derailment made her realize something that she had taken for granted: her gender would not factor in anything she really wanted to do. “I was raised by parents who told me ‘whatever you want to be you will be.’ I was very fortunate in that respect. So I grew up believing that there was nothing I couldn’t do.”
In 1993, after over 20 years of teaching, she was made Dean of Hastings. “That was the first time that I got a sense of how meaningful my position was to young women. I hadn’t focused my career from the perspective of making a difference for women. It was a subtle shift for me knowing that my success meant that the next generation would have it easier and I was helping doubts to be dispelled. As Dean I felt the weight of that role for the first time.”
Dispelling preconceptions has proven to be a critical part of being a law school professor and administrator. Dean Kane continues to be bemused by the number of entering students who don’t understand what law and lawyering are all about. “They expect drama. Most of the law is very undramatic and requires a lot of work and a remarkable quantity of judgment. We can’t teach students to have good judgment; we can only teach them that judgment is good.”
Kane knows that understanding the obligation a lawyer has to clear thinking and responsible action can be a heady realization. Part of the law school experience is to encourage students to harness their energy into creating solid skills which will give them power in the profession -- and then tempering this power with maturity and insight. “Lawyers are powerful, but to the extent that they exhibit their powers they are not good lawyers.”
This personal growth will come in part from, in her opinion, another critical role of law school faculty and staff: helping students to honestly evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and guiding them towards where they can do the most good. It’s not always easy; not all students agree with their advisors’ assessment of them and they may hold images of themselves that might not reflect their true talents. "Lawyers who deal with cases and clients need to have instincts that allow them to move quickly and have good communication skills and empathy so they can work with a huge variety of people. There are people who don’t have this capacity; that’s not their strength. That doesn’t mean they’ll be bad lawyers. They might be people who can figure out very complex things and understand abstractly and theoretically the impact of a change in the law—that’s a huge talent. And that’s the beauty of the law; it requires different talents. A key responsibility for law schools, I believe, is to identify and direct that talent rather than allowing a student to go off in the direction of being a lawyer who might actually harm people."
Mary Kay Kane lives a life dedicated to the law and learning. From authoring books to sitting on various boards and committees, she has found that the more you give, the more you receive and that an individual’s relationship with the law needs to be nurtured just like any other. "People are defeating themselves by not taking the opportunity to look a little more widely and find the things that are going to make a difference to them. It’s not a question of a 40-hour week, it’s a question of making yourself feel good about what you’re doing and the ultimate good you can create."
She believes that it is never too late to rekindle whatever it was that made you become a lawyer in the first place. She urges all lawyers to take stock of themselves—and then take action. "What about being a part-time law faculty member? What about helping charitable organizations? There are so many nonprofit organizations that need legal advice—go serve on their boards. Help them to do the work they do by contributing your talent. Or have an impact on the law itself. There are many law reform activities that you can become involved in that would not be adverse to your client."
Dean Kane experienced this kind of renewal with her own law career when she became Dean of Hastings. "I’d been a pure academic and was now taking on a whole administrative load. It was a good time for me to make that switch and to take on new challenges. I believe in the higher education system and the legal education system. Both here at Hastings and through my work with the American Law Institute and the ABA and others I can affect legal education more broadly; to improve it, to make better standards for it, and to advance a more global curriculum. I get involved in national organizations as a means of contributing to the betterment of legal education of which Hastings will be a part."
Mary Kay Kane