John Siliciano will serve as interim dean of CU Law School

Siliciano

Cornell Professor of Law John A. Siliciano has been named interim dean of Cornell Law School. Siliciano, whose new appointment was effective July 1, has been vice dean of the Law School since 1997 and a member of its faculty since 1984.

Siliciano will serve as interim dean while a national search is conducted for a successor to Lee Teitelbaum, who was the Law School's Allan R. Tessler Dean and professor of law for four years before stepping down at the end of the 2002-03 academic year.

Siliciano's academic areas of expertise are criminal law, torts and products liability. He is co-author (with Cornell Law Professor James Henderson and Richard Pearson) of The Torts Process (Aspen, 6th edition, 2002).

An undergraduate history major at Cornell who graduated summa cum laude in 1975, Siliciano received an MPA degree from Princeton in 1979 and a J.D. from Columbia that same year. While a law student he was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. Before joining the Cornell Law School faculty, he clerked, first for Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the second circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals, and then for Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also was an associate at Califano, Ross and Heineman, and at Arnold and Porter, both Washington, D.C., firms, in the early 1980s.

The search committee for a new Law School dean is being chaired by Cornell Provost Biddy Martin.