Kevin Washburn, who joined the College of Law as dean in 2018, has announced that he will step down from the deanship, effective January 1, 2025.
During his time as dean, Washburn has been a national leader in legal education, serving a term as chairman of the board of trustees of the Law School Admission Council, followed by a three-year term on the nine-member Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools.
Washburn has remained an active scholar, continuing to publish research during his time as dean and co-teaching a course on Federal Indian Law with Professor Ann Estin. His recent articles have focused on indigenous conservation and tribal co-management of federal public lands. He also serves as the co-editor in chief of the leading treatise in his field, the Felix S. Cohen Handbook of Federal Indian Law, which is being revised for a new edition.
Washburn came to Iowa after having served as the dean of the University of New Mexico and serving in a Senate-confirmed position at the Department of the Interior in the second term of the Obama administration. While at Iowa, he also took partial leave from the deanship for two and a half months in 2020-2021 to lead the Biden-Harris transition team for the Department of the Interior.
Except for one year spent as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Washburn has spent his entire career in public service or public legal education. He began his career as an attorney with five years at the U.S. Department of Justice, first as a trial attorney in the Environment and Natural Resources Division in Washington, D.C., through the Attorney General’s Honors Program, and then as an assistant U.S. attorney, prosecuting violent crimes in Indian country in New Mexico. Washburn also served late in the Clinton administration as the general counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission, and then later in the Obama administration as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior. He began his academic career at the University of Minnesota, where he earned tenure, and also served on the law faculties at the University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico, where he was dean.
Washburn graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation. Immediately following law school, he clerked for Judge William C. Canby, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Washburn is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and is recognized as the first enrolled tribal member of any tribe to become a law school dean.
Read the farewell letter from Dean Washburn here.
Q&A with Dean Washburn
Q: What will be your most important legacy at Iowa Law?
A: I hope that it will be the vision of Iowa Law as the “Writing Law School.” We are obviously not the first institution to realize that better writing leads to clearer thinking, but we have embraced it more than most other law schools. We have long had a commitment to teaching writing. Unlike some law schools that use adjunct professors or junior professors called “fellows” to teach legal analysis and writing, we have a dedicated and talented faculty teaching these fundamental skills.
One of our founding Legal Analysis, Writing and Research (LAWR) professors came to Iowa Law with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and we like to think that he brought that DNA to the College of Law. During my time here, we increased the size of our writing faculty from four full-time professors to seven and have added part-time professors. This ensures very small class sizes, a close relationship with students, and dedicated feedback from true experts.
We have also turned the leadership of our longstanding Writing Center over to the LAWR faculty to improve the alignment between these two key components of our law school. Led by Professor Dawn Anderson, that realignment succeeded better than any of us could have hoped. Now called the Writing and Academic Success Center, it is helping our students become better writers.
Many of our commitments in this area are not new. We have been committed to writing since long before I arrived. We have also had four excellent student-edited law journals since the 1990s. In recent years, we have expanded each of them and seen each of them increase their online footprint and offer more symposia. As a result of our focus on writing, more of our students are winning “best brief” awards in moot court competitions; they are publishing more and more articles in law journals at other schools in addition to the usual notes and case comments published in our in-house journals. We are also seeing record numbers of graduates earning judicial clerkships upon graduation.
Q: What have you learned as dean?
A: My conviction about the importance of diversity has only increased during my time here. In 2020, we brought in the most diverse class in our history. When that class graduated in 2023, those students landed the most judicial clerkships in our history, including five federal circuit court clerkships, six state supreme court clerkships, and 36 other state and federal judicial clerkships. That class also produced our best overall employment numbers ever, ranking Iowa Law seventh best in the nation in employment outcomes in the most recent rankings. I don’t think that it is an accident that our most diverse class has also been our most successful class in employment.
Q: How much has the College of Law changed during your time as dean?
A: A lot! There are myriad new programs and initiatives, including an embedded therapist, a dramatically expanded environmental law program, and new programs to support student bar passage.
We have brought in our strongest students academically in our history. On the faculty, we have seen a number of retirements, a few departures, and a lot of new faculty hired. Indeed, this year we have hired our largest crop of new faculty in many years, with eight new full-time faculty members joining us. That is almost 20 percent new faculty in one year. By the time I leave, the faculty will have been substantially renewed.
We have also made strides in embracing diversity. After bringing in the most diverse class of students in history, we established a Diversity Alumni Council, chaired by alumna Tiffany Ferguson (06JD), which provides critical alumni connections to students from underrepresented communities and first-generation law students. We also restarted our Faculty Fellow program, which is designed to provide research opportunities, faculty mentoring, and career development for promising legal scholars and teachers. The first two fellows found faculty jobs, and the current fellow, our alum Vinita Singh (18JD), is showing incredible potential.
Q: What challenges does the College of Law face?
A: Like the rest of the world, we need to figure out successful ways to embrace generative artificial intelligence. It will be changing the practice of law dramatically. We also need to learn how best to prepare our students for the NextGen Bar Exam, which will begin in one of our neighboring states, Missouri, in 2026, and in Iowa in 2027.
Resources are increasingly an issue, as public support for higher education diminishes. We have more than three years left on a capital campaign which will help us build a stronger resource base, and I am pleased that we are more than halfway to our $55 million goal.
Q: Why have you decided to leave at the end of this year?
A: Believe it or not, in more than 30 years since I graduated from law school, I have never been in any position for this long. Six years is a long time!
When a professor becomes a dean, the professor loses many of the advantages of being in academia. I miss getting to know a lot of students well and having close relationships with faculty colleagues. Another great privilege of being a faculty member is having the time to luxuriate in the world of ideas. I have kept my research agenda going, but I have always felt a little harried. That is not a recipe for producing the best ideas. I look forward to having more time with students and colleagues, and to focusing more fully on my scholarship.
The dean role is also hard on family life because it can be all-consuming. My wife, Libby, and I have a seven-year-old son, who has endured two parents with very demanding jobs. I have been dean for six of his seven years, and, during that time, Libby has worked in high-level positions in the White House and at the San Diego Zoo, among others. Libby keeps reminding me that it won’t be long before he is a teenager and will become less interested in his dad. Several times in the past few years, my family has gone on adventures without me. I hope to be able to join them much more often. By stepping down at the end of December, I can return to being a regular faculty member again before my son turns eight.
Q: What will you miss about the job?
A: I have enjoyed so much of it. What an honor it has been to lead this wonderful law school! I have made so many great friends, many of them our alums. I have worked with outstanding faculty and staff, and I have met incredible students who will go on to change the world in ways big and small.
One highlight has been the twice-a-year Levitt Lectures, which have been so impactful in our community by bringing in profound authors and thinkers. Meeting Doris Kearns Goodwin, Van Jones, the late Cokie Roberts, Woodward and Bernstein, and so many others, and sharing that experience with so many members of our community at the amazing Hancher Auditorium has been a very special experience.
Under Dean Washburn’s leadership, the College of Law achieved many key accomplishments, 10 of which are highlighted below.
( 1 ) Developed the “Writing Law School” vision and invested heavily in faculty and other resources to realize this unique mission for the College of Law.
( 2 ) Landed the three most academically qualified entering classes in law school history based on LSAT scores and median undergraduate GPAs (in the fall entering classes in 2021, 2022, and 2023).
( 3 ) Landed the most diverse class in the law school’s history in 2020 and 2024.
( 4 ) Increased the successful recruitment of UI grads to Iowa Law, retaining more of the very best Hawkeyes in Iowa City.
( 5 ) Stabilized the Office of Career Services under the leadership of Associate Dean Carin Crain, helping to produce among the very best 10-month-out employment outcomes of any law school in the country, culminating in seventh best employment figures nationally for the most recent class, the Class of 2023.
( 6 ) Developed record numbers of judicial law clerks, with graduates of the Class of 2023 earning five federal circuit court clerkships, six state supreme court clerkships, and 36 other state and federal judicial clerkships.
( 7 ) Developed the Hubbell Environmental Law Initiative with the support of Fred Hubbell (76JD) and Charlotte Beyer Hubbell (76JD), who made the largest cash gift in law school history to facilitate the work of the Initiative. Under the leadership of Professor Shannon Roesler, the Hubbell Initiative has reinvigorated Iowa Law’s environmental law program.
( 8 ) Developed the first mental health counselor position embedded in the Boyd Law Building, making Iowa Law one of the first law schools to make such a significant and sustained investment in student mental health.
( 9 ) Established a new Diversity Alumni Council, chaired by Tiffany Ferguson (06JD), focused on supporting un- and underrepresented communities and first-generation students to enhance opportunity, access, and diversity at the College of Law.
( 10 ) Developed a holistic new bar success program, led by Professor Dawn Anderson, that increased first-time bar passage scores markedly for 2023 and 2024 graduates.