Sponsored by the AALS Sections on: Associate Deans for Academic Affairs and Reasearch, Critical Theories, Leadership, New Law Professors, Pro Bono & Access to Justice, Professional Responsibility, and Women in Legal Education
This fall, one of the largest and most diverse classes of students will enter law school. Students want to be lawyers with the highest of aspirations. This year, many seem to be driven by the challenges to U.S. democracy and the rule of law. What do law schools offer them? What should we? And how do and should these offerings mold their professional identities as lawyers? In this panel, we will explore how the law school stock and “hidden” curricula teach about these concepts and what reforms and interventions we might consider to strengthen these foundational commitments.
Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Professor of Law and Director of Experiential Learning, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law
Professor Capulong directs the experiential learning program, which consists of in-house clinics, externships, and simulation courses. Prior to joining Richardson Law, he was a professor, lawyering program director, and interim dean at the City University of New York School of Law; professor and associate dean for clinical and experiential education at the University of Montana Alexander Blewett III School of Law; lawyering professor at the New York University School of Law; and public interest and public policy programs director and lecturer in law and urban studies at Stanford Law School. Professor Capulong was also a visiting professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law; China Youth University for Political Studies; and Universidad de Granada Facultad de Derecho, where he helped launch the school’s first clinical course. His current scholarly interests include legal education, lawyering, professional identity formation, law and social justice, race and racism, and dispute resolution.
Before joining the academy, Professor Capulong was a litigator, policy analyst, and community organizer for various nonprofits, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, Community Service Society, Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Philippine Center for Immigrant Rights, and Public Interest Law Center (Manila). A former Karpatkin Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union and pro se law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Professor Capulong received his BA from NYU and JD from CUNY as a Patricia Roberts Harris Scholar and Davis-Putter Fellow.
Professor Capulong is the former co-chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Education and has served on the boards of the Montana ACLU, Society of American Law Teachers, National Lawyers Guild (San Francisco), International Endowment for Democracy, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Kendall L. Kerew, Clinical Professor Associate Dean for Experiential Education; Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Externship Program Administration/Leadership, Externship Program, Georgia State University College of Law
Kendall Kerew is a Clinical Professor and Director of the Externship Program at Georgia State University College of Law. She teaches Contracts, Elder Law, and the Externship Seminar. She is the recipient of GSU Law’s Patricia T. Morgan Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2023), Steven J. Kaminshine Award for Excellence in Service (2019), David J. Maleski Award for Teaching Excellence (2017), and the Black Law Student Association’s Bernadette Hartsfield Faculty Award (2024 and 2016).
Kerew’s scholarship focuses on topics related to professional identity formation and externship pedagogy. Kerew is a Fellow of the Holloran Center at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, Chair-Elect of the AALS Aging and the Law Section, and on the Executive Committee of the AALS Balance and Well-being in Legal Education Section. She is an active member of the AALS Clinical Legal Education Section’s Externships and Teaching Methodologies Committees and CLEA’s Advocacy and Externships Committees.
Prior to joining the faculty in 2005, Kerew worked as an associate at King & Spalding and as an assistant attorney general for the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.
Andrew King-Ries, Davis-Johnston Professor of Law; Associate Dean of Professionalism and Community Engagement, Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana
Professor King-Ries teaches Domestic Violence, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Race and Racism, Juvenile Justice, Evidence, and Law and Literature. He also supervises the Domestic Violence Clinic and the Prosecution Clinics. He has written numerous articles dealing with race, racism, and professional identity, in addition to articles about prosecution of domestic violence offenses. He is a frequent presenter on domestic violence, criminal law, criminal procedure, and race and racism.
Before coming to Montana, he was a speechwriter for the Secretary of Education, Lauro Cavazos; a clerk for the United States Court of Appeals of the Eighth Circuit; and, for eight years, a prosecutor, specializing in domestic violence cases, for the King County Prosecutor’s Office in Seattle, Washington. Professor King-Ries is married to a writer and lawyer and they have an eighteen-year-old science and soccer fanatic.
Professor King-Ries graduated from Brown University in 1988 with a degree in History. He received his law degree from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Order of the Coif and an editor on the Washington University Law Quarterly. He currently serves as a member of the Just Response Sexual Assault Resource Center Advisory Board. In addition, he is a member of the Montana Supreme Court Criminal Jury Instructions Committee. For a number of years, King-Ries was the chair of the University of Montana’s Discrimination Grievance Committee.
Monte Mills, Charles I. Stone Professor of Law and the Director of the Native American Law Center (NALC), University of Washington School of Law
Monte Mills joined the UW faculty in 2022 as Charles I. Stone Professor of Law and the Director of the Native American Law Center (NALC). He teaches American Indian Law, Property, and other classes focused on Native American and natural resources related topics.
Monte’s research and writing focuses on the intersection of Federal Indian Law, Tribal sovereignty, and natural resources as well as race and racism in the law and legal education. He served as an Executive Editor on the 2024 edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law and serves as a co-author on two textbooks: American Indian Law, Cases and Commentary (along with Robert T. Anderson, Sarah A. Krakoff, and Kevin K. Washburn) and Native American Natural Resources Law (with Michael Blumm and Elizabeth Kronk Warner). Monte also co-authored A Third Way: Decolonizing the Laws of Indigenous Cultural Protection, which was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2020. Monte’s legal scholarship and other written work has also appeared in the Natural Resources Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, Environmental Law, High Country News, the American Indian Law Journal, the Public Land and Resources Law Review, and The Conversation, among other forums.
Prior to joining the faculty at UW, Monte was a member of the faculty at the Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana. Before that, Monte was the Director of the Legal Department for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in Colorado, an in-house counsel department that he helped organize and implement in 2005 following completion of a unique two-year in-house attorney training program. As Director of the Tribe’s Legal Department, Monte represented and counseled the Tribe on a broad array of issues, including litigation in tribal, state, and federal courts, legislative matters before the Colorado General Assembly and the United States Congress, and internal tribal matters such as contracting, code-drafting, and gaming issues.
Kellye Testy, Executive Director & CEO of AALS
Kellye Y. Testy is the executive director and chief executive officer of the Association of American Law Schools which serves as the institutional membership organization for its 175 member law schools and as the learned society for the legal academy.
Prior to joining AALS, Testy served as the president and chief executive officer of the Law School Admission Council, where she led the organization in its committed efforts to advance law and justice by encouraging diverse, talented individuals to study law and by supporting their enrollment and learning journeys from prelaw through practice.
Testy served as dean and professor of law at University of Washington School of Law from 2009 to 2017 and at Seattle University School of Law from 2005 to 2009. She began her career as a law professor at the University of Puget Sound in 1992, which then became Seattle University. As a professor, Testy was an award-winning teacher and an insightful scholar who brought an equity lens to her focus on business and corporate law. Her areas of expertise include leadership, business and corporate law, gender and the law, and legal education. Testy earned her undergraduate degree in journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington, and her law degree from Indiana University Maurer School of Law—Bloomington.
In addition to her role at AALS, she serves on the boards of the Washington Law Institute and LSSSE and teaches law and leadership at a number of law schools across the country.
