Alumni in Japan celebrate Dean Horowitz
Duke Law alumni in Japan gathered on March 7 for a celebration of Associate Dean Judy Horowitz’s 30 years at Duke Law and to honor the international programs she has helped create and build.
The alumni event was held at Gakushi Kaikan in Tokyo at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 7. Horowitz was on hand for the festivities, as was Dean David F. Levi and Jennifer Maher ’83, associate dean for international studies. The event was hosted by Hideyuki Sakai LLM’82, managing partner at Bingham McCutchen Murase, Sakai Mimura Aizawa ⎯ Foreign Law Joint Enterprise. Nearly 90 alumni attended. [See the photo gallery.]
Levi, Horowitz, and Maher also met with alumni and representatives of law firms during their trip to Japan. On March 6, Levi presented “The Federal Rulemaking Process: In Praise of the Rules Enabling Act” to the University of Tokyo Law School faculty. On March 8, the Duke delegation met with the Secretary General of the Supreme Court of Japan.
The trip serves as a fitting marker of Horowitz’s role in the internationalization of Duke Law School. When she began working with Duke Law School’s international programs in 1981, just a handful of international lawyers were enrolled as LLM and SJD students, and exchange relationships, summer institutes, and international alumni associations simply did not exist.
In the 2011-12 academic year, 96 attorneys are enrolled in the LLM program; 15 students are in the SJD program, and Duke Law has exchange agreements with 21 foreign universities. The Asia-America Institute in Transnational Law and the Duke-Geneva Institute in Transnational Law are thriving, as is the Durham-based Summer Institute on Law, Language and Culture, and alumni have organized clubs all over the world.
Duke Law School’s international alumni now number more than 1,200 and are engaged in every manner of legal endeavor. They are partners in major law firms, leading in-house legal departments, and prominent judges, prosecutors, public interest lawyers, and government officials. All were affected by Horowitz during their Duke education, and most count their time at Duke as transformative.
“We have so many wonderful alumni in Japan as a result of the marvelous LLM program that Judy Horowitz and others have created,” Levi said, noting this was his first trip to Japan. “It was a particular pleasure to be able to go there with Judy to celebrate her tenure at Duke Law.”