Introduction to Faculty Essays

This collection of essays by Mercer law faculty is the result of a process that my predecessor as dean, Daisy Floyd, set in motion in the fall of 2008. At that time, Dean Floyd named an ad hoc committee to conduct a comprehensive review of the law school's celebrated Woodruff Curriculum. Adopted after extensive discussion, planning, and debate, the Woodruff Curriculum went into effect in 1990. Within a few years, the American Bar Association recognized the Woodruff Curriculum's distinctive and remarkably forward-looking contribution to legal education by naming the law school as the recipient of the Association's prestigious Gambrell Professionalism Award.

The much-discussed MacCrate and Carnegie Reports that appeared in 1992 and 2007, respectively, unmistakably owed much to the Woodruff Curriculum that preceded them.