Donors Establish Rothenberg Fund for Public Service with More than $100,000 in Gifts

Dean Rothenberg's driving passion as leader of the Law School has been public service. As she prepares to step down this spring and return to the faculty, a number of the school's graduates and friends have acted to honor her commitment and recognize her accomplishments.

These leaders in support of Maryland Law have donated more than $100,000 to establish the Karen H. Rothenberg Fund for Public Service. They now ask you to join them in making a gift.

The Fund will provide direct support for the purposes nearest her heart, including:

• Scholarships for students committed to public service.
• Loan repayment assistance for graduates pursuing public service careers.
• Grants for students engaged in projects that benefit individuals in need.

Your support of the Fund will serve as a lasting tribute to Dean Rothenberg's leadership. Moreover, it will ensure that the School of Law will have the requisite resources to remain a national leader in serving the needs of the public.

A National Leader in Serving the Needs of the Public

The work of the University of Maryland School of Law has never been more important.

Each year, the Law School's legal clinics provide more than 110,000 hours of free legal services to poor and marginalized citizens of Maryland. Requests for assistance with housing, consumer protection, low income taxpayer disputes, disability rights, education, health care, and access to public benefits are all increasing in these difficult economic times. Many of our very best students are drawn to the School of Law because of these outstanding clinics, hoping to launch careers as public interest lawyers. But the increasing cost of tuition and shrinking availability of student loan resources is putting that dream out of reach for some.

For nearly a decade, Dean Karen Rothenberg has been pursuing innovative approaches to meeting these challenges. She has helped establish the School of Law as a national leader among law schools, with the commitment and capacity to improve the lives of citizens in Maryland and beyond. Her accomplishments are many and include:

• Founding innovative new programs, from the nationally ranked Law & Health Care Program, to the new LEAD Initiative on ethics and professionalism in legal education. These programs produce solutions that benefit individuals and communities in need of the law's protections and foster vital new scholarship in emerging areas of law.
• Dramatically expanding the Clinical Law Program, one of the state's largest providers of free legal services, to increase the number of clients in need served each year by our students and faculty.
• Establishing a loan repayment program for students who pursue careers in public service and creating a new scholarship program to attract highly qualified incoming students with demonstrated records of leadership and public service.
• Expanding support for student public service work, ranging from stipends for students pursuing summer work with Baltimore non-profit agencies to grants for student groups providing legal services to Gulf Coast residents affected by Hurricane Katrina.
• Engendering an understanding in students that the law is a public calling, that lawyers, as the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct state, have "special responsibility for the quality of justice."