Now in her fifth and final year as the dean of the University’s School of Law, Margie Paris sat down with the Emerald to explain how she arrived at becoming a lawyer, a professor and as dean, and what she has accomplished so far in her various careers.
Oregon Daily Emerald: What initially interested you in the law?

Margie Paris: I became interested in the law because I worked as a secretary in a law school and then a law firm. I was a college dropout. Back in the late ’70s, I was just looking for a way to make a living, and deciding what direction my life was going to take.
ODE: What do you feel like some of your biggest accomplishments as a lawyer were?
MP: I was a criminal defense lawyer. I think that every representation of a criminal defendant is an accomplishment. It’s just making yourself an advocate that helps both an individual that is under a great deal of stress and it helps the system that is completely dependant on having strong advocacy on the defense side, so … I felt accomplished every day, frankly.
ODE: When and what made you turn to teaching the law?
MP: I came from a family of teachers … I always think I had the teaching bug, and while I was in law school, I was interested in the idea of becoming a law professor.
ODE: What drew you to the University?
MP: The law school here has an amazing reputation nationally, the faculty is wonderful here, it’s very collegial, so that was the kind of place that I wanted to be in; the location drew me also, I loved the idea of being in the Northwest. My husband and I were born and raised in Chicago, and we were both practicing law in Chicago, and the idea of us having an adventure and leaving Chicago and coming out to the Northwest was very attractive to us. But the primary thing was that I got lucky because this faculty wanted to hire somebody in criminal law so it had an opening for which I was qualified.
ODE: What do you feel are some of your biggest accomplishments as a professor to date?
MP: I would say partnering with my other colleagues who teach in criminal-related areas here to create a really strong curriculum in criminal law and criminal procedure, the area generally of criminal practice. We really work together well to make sure that we have a good curriculum and to help mentor students who want to go into criminal practice and to link them up with practitoners so that they can learn about the practice of criminal law and to hopefully get jobs in that field.
ODE: And so how did you become interim dean of the law school?
MP: Our former dean, Leard Kirkpatrick, was leaving his deanship in December of 2005, and at the time I was his associate dean. We engaged in a national search, as we always do — I was not a candidate in that search — and we had three finalists in whom we were very interested in, but each of those finalists took a different job. So we were left without a dean, and so at that time the faculty asked the provost that I be named interim dean, and then ultimately at the end of a few months, the provost met with the faculty and they decided to let me have a full term as dean, rather than immediately go back into another dean search.
ODE: Last year you helped draft the University Senate’s policy against the Pacifica Forum?
MP: Yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a policy against them. It was a policy statement that condemned some of their speech, some of their message. It wasn’t saying that the Pacifica Forum is bad, but rather that some of their messages are bad.
ODE: What spurred you to take this stance?
MP: I have to credit my partner in that, my colleague Bob Bussel … the director of the Labor Education Research Center, LERC, for spurring me to work with him on that. I have long been really, really concerned about the Pacifica Forum’s message of anti-Semitism and hate and just historic revisionism, just absolute falsity … so I had been concerned for years about the group, and I think it’s important for people to speak out. I mean, I’m a strong believer in free speech, and the Pacifica Forum has free speech rights that I respect, that they can say whatever they want to say, but I also think it’s very important that groups respond with speech of their own to point out where the Pacifica Forum is lying and spewing hate.
ODE: As dean of the law school, what do you feel like you’ve accomplished?
MP: One, we’ve dramatically increased the scholarship aid that we give to students. That’s been really important in a time where law students are taking on increasing debt load in order to pay for their legal education. As state funding has decreased, we’ve had to increase our tuition, and at the same time we’ve dramatically increased the financial aid we give to students. We’ve had a lot of retirements and some departures, and so this has been a time of been a time of building faculty. I think we’ve made over 12 faculty hires in the past five years. We’ve invested a lot in some of our centers and programs, and as a result of it they’ve become very successful. We have three programs that have been named my U.S. News as Top 10 nationally, and that’s a huge achievement for a school this size.
ODE: What programs?
MP: Appropriate Dispute Resolution, Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Legal Research and Writing.
ODE: When you return to being a professor, what courses will you teach?
MP: Definitely, I’ll be teaching the first year criminal law course. I teach that now, and I look forward to continuing that. I’ll teach some mixture of criminal procedure courses and possibly an appellate advocacy course.
ODE: Any advice to incoming and returning law students?
MP: For incoming law students, really savor this time that they’re law students, that there is so much that’s transformative about this experience and that I want them to really enjoy it and be in the moment and to not let it flash by too quickly. For returning law students, maintain optimism. This is a hard time for law students because the legal market has been in recession for the past two years and so I know for many law students they’re wondering where they are going to be employed, where they are going to end up and so what I would say to them is hang in there, retain their optimism. The market will get better and they will find a fulfilling career.


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