ITHACA, N.Y. -- Stewart J. Schwab, professor of law at Cornell Law School and a specialist in labor and employment law, and tort and contract law, has been named the new dean of the Law School, Cornell President Jeffrey S. Lehman announced today (Dec. 5).

"Stewart Schwab is a nationally recognized scholar who has the respect and admiration of his colleagues on the Cornell faculty," said Lehman. "I am confident that, with his strong leadership, the Law School will make ever greater contributions to our understanding of the law and legal institutions and will continue to prepare our students for lives of accomplished service within a rapidly changing profession."

Schwab earned an M.A. in labor economics and industrial organization (1978), a J.D. (magna cum laude, 1980) and a Ph.D. in economics (1981) from the University of Michigan, then clerked for the Hon. J. Dickson Phillips of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor before joining the Law School faculty in 1983.

Cornell Provost Biddy Martin, who chaired the search committee, said: "Stewart brings to the position 20 years of teaching and scholarship in areas that have enormous significance and breadth. He is one of our most productive and distinguished legal scholars and is widely respected by his colleagues. I look forward to working with him." She added, "We were fortunate to have a superb set of candidates, including three from within Cornell among our five finalists, and making the final choice was challenging."

"I am delighted but humbled at being chosen," said Schwab. "I look forward to working with my colleagues to make Cornell Law School and the larger university an even stronger place than it is today."

Schwab has examined issues in labor and employment law through empirical analysis, as well as from comparative and law and economics perspectives. He is the co-author, with Samuel Estreicher, of Foundations of Labor and Employment Law (Foundation Press, 2000). Among his casebook publications are Employment Law: Cases and Materials (Matthew Bender & Company, 3rd ed, 2002), with Steven L. Willborn and John F. Burton Jr. He has written about employment discrimination, workplace accommodations to people with disabilities, sexual harassment in the workplace, constitutional tort litigation and labor law reform and has contributed numerous chapters to books on employment law. He has published articles in scholarly law journals at Yale University, the University of Chicago, New York University, William and Mary, University of Michigan and Cornell and he is currently co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

At Cornell he has taught courses on comparative labor law, contracts in a global society, corporations, empirical studies of the legal system, torts, employment and labor law, and law and economics. He was a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Nebraska Law School in spring 2003 and a Fulbright senior scholar at the Australian National University's Centre for Law and Economics in January 1998. He has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, the Chapman Tripp Visiting Lecturer at Victoria University Faculty of Law, New Zealand, an Olin visiting research professor of law and economics at the University of Virginia Law School and a visiting professor at law schools at Duke University and the University of Michigan.

Schwab has consulted for the World Bank on reform of labor and employment laws in parts of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union and has been a consultant on ERISA, ESOP and Title VII litigation. Among the projects he currently is working on is "What Do CEOs Bargain For?: An Empirical Study of Key Legal Components of CEO Contracts" (with R. Thomas). He also served on the City of Ithaca Board of Zoning Appeals in 1985-88.

Schwab succeeds Lee Teitelbaum, who served as dean of the Law School from July 1999 to June 2003. In addition to the provost, search committee members were: Walter Cohen, vice provost; Stephen Crane, chair, Law School Advisory Council; and these Law School faculty members: Professors Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen Garvey, Barbara Holden-Smith, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Annelise Riles and Faust Rossi, and Carol Grumbach, senior lecturer and director, Lawyering Program. For details on the other finalists, see the Provost's Web site: http://www.provost.cornell.edu.

Founded in 1887, Cornell Law School, http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu, is a major research center and a leader in legal education. The school has about 45 full-time faculty members as well as a number of adjunct faculty members and practitioners teaching part time. It enrolls about 600 students, from most states and several countries, in its J.D. degree program and 60 additional students, most holding foreign law degrees, in its master of laws (LL.M.) degree program. It also offers specialized or combined degrees, such as the U.S. Juris-Doctor/French Maîtrise en Droit degree, offered jointly with the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the J.D.-M.LL.P. degree, offered in conjunction with Berlin's Humboldt University.

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