Law School Centers

I posted a while back when I was visiting at Concurring Opinions about the role of academic Centers within the law school enterprise.  That post didn't generate a lot of discussion, but I'd really be interested in whether anyone at the Lounge has any thoughts about the ideal contribution an academic Center can make to a law school.  Is it all about marketing?  Or are there other important contributions a Center can make?  As a center director, I like to think that we might also serve a useful function in terms of academic programming for faculty and students and to use our center website as a hub for collecting information in relevant areas that might be of interest to faculty, students and the broader legal community.  Also, Centers can be useful focal points for interdisciplinary work, both within and outside the school's university.  Other advantages or perceived disadvantages of centers?  [I'm not a center zealot and I understand the political, resouce allocation and other problems centers can cause, so I suppose my question is whether the upsides outweigh the downsides, and in what circumstances...]

Comments

[Archana Sridhar]

(Disclosure at the outset: As Assistant Dean for Research at the IU Maurer School of Law, I work with our research centers quite a bit and think they really contribute a great deal to the school.)

I agree with the commenter over at Concurring Opinions that interdisciplinary ventures are ideally suited to a center model because there is then an institutional mantle for work that may have different incentives at play.

Centers allow a space apart from clinicals for community service and collaboration with nonprofits and other organizations.

Research centers at law schools are a vehicle to catalyze an intellectual community around a set of ideas. In order to be of value, they need to enhance the quality (and quantity?) of research produced by the participating faculty members. There needs to be an ongoing review process to justify the existence of such centers.

Faculty members who are given the directorships of such centers need to be institutional team players, and see their centers as a mechanism for enhancing the school's external relations - things like grantseeking, alumni/ae relations, admissions, and media relations. All of this takes a lot of work - meetings with donors, pitches to journalists, projects for students...

[Jacqueline Lipton]

Thanks so much for those comments. This seems to be a useful way to look at centers. I appreciate it.