Issue 73 - Stanford Lawyer - Stanford University

NEW FACULTY
29
STANFORD
LAWYER
New Faculty and Promotions
Legal Ethics Professor Norman Spaulding ’97
Joins Law Faculty
Growing up in Berkeley, California, Norman W. Spaulding ’97 couldn’t help feeling
a deep appreciation for the power of law. His African-American father and
his white mother were married within a year of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark
1967 Supreme Court ruling that declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.
“It was incomprehensible to me, the idea that a state could have a law
making it impossible for my mother and father to be married,” the 34-year-old scholar recalls now,
shaking his head. “Since then, I’ve always had this sense of how deep law can reach into society. It can
reach into the family. It can reach into the bedroom. It can reach into marriages.”
Spaulding, a nationally recognized scholar in legal ethics and the history of the profession, won
rave reviews at Stanford last year for his performance as a visiting professor from the University of
California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Now he hopes to build on that success in his new
position at Stanford as a tenured professor of law and John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar.
“I was quite happy at Berkeley,” he said in a recent interview, “but the students I had here were
easily the best group I’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching.” Stanford’s stimulating intellectual climate
was attractive as well: “If there’s one thing that really drove this decision home for me, it was the idea
of getting to share work and grow as a scholar in this community.”
As a Stanford law student in the mid-1990s, Spaulding served as an articles editor for the Stanford
Law Review, a member editor for the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, and a member of the Black
Law Students Association. After graduation, he practiced in the San Francisco office of Skadden, Arps,
Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, where he did environmental litigation. Spaulding then clerked for Judge
Betty Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Judge Thelton Henderson
of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, before joining the Boalt faculty
in 2000. Last year, the Association of American Law Schools presented him with its Outstanding
Scholarly Paper Prize for an article he wrote for the Columbia Law Review, “Constitution as Counter-
Monument: Federalism, Reconstruction and the Problem of Collective Memory.”
Barbara Allen Babcock, Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita, remembers Spaulding as a
standout in her criminal procedure course at Stanford. “His outstanding quality was and is intellectual
eagerness and thoughtfulness,” she said. “He really loves the law and the study of law. That is what
makes him a great teacher—his enthusiasm and passion are truly inimitable. It’s just a terrific hire.”
Much of Spaulding’s scholarship focuses on when lawyers go wrong; he probes the causes of professional
failure and malaise from a historical perspective. “We often hear the claim that the profession
is in decline, that it’s in crisis because lawyers have become too zealous and too client-centered,” he
said. “But that has never sat well with me.” In fact, “when you look back at the historical record, you
find that most of the problems that we take to be indicia of a crisis in the legal profession are not new.
American lawyers have always wrestled with the tension between serving clients, making a living, and
serving the communities in which they work.” People will rightly be suspicious of lawyers and the
power that they have in a society governed by law, he said. But at the same time, “they’ll want a zealous
advocate when their rights are on the table.”
At Stanford, Spaulding will teach courses in professional responsibility, civil procedure, and remedies.
He plans to continue pro bono work (he’s representing a California prisoner) and is collaborating
with Babcock to update her widely respected casebook, Civil Procedure: Cases and Problems. “You can’t
imagine my surprise that I’m back here. But it’s wonderful and exciting, too. Everybody here does
such exceptional work. It’s a real inspiration just to be in the building.”—Theresa Johnston
PHOTOS: STEVE GLADFELTER; PHOTO OF CALDWELL BY JOE NETO; PHOTO OF HO BY BOB NAROD