Elegant Reception at Georgetown University law Center

On the evening of Jan. 7, deans from the nation's leading law schools and lawyers from the top law firms gathered for an elegant reception at Georgetown University Law Center.

What brought this group of attorneys and academics together? Money -- lots of it.

The event, organized by administrators from Harvard, Stanford, and Georgetown, among other schools, honored law firms that have doled out $1 million or more to the legal academy. In so doing, they marked an intriguing trend in legal education, and one that is troubling to some: a mammoth increase in the amount of money law firms are giving to institutions dedicated to legal education.

Fifteen years ago, no U.S. law firm had ever made a $1 million donation to a law school.

Other law firms have seen law school solicitations as an opportunity to influence curriculum.

Robert Clifford , a Chicago-based personal injury lawyer, says he donated $1 million to his alma mater, De Paul University College of Law, for the Clifford Seminar on Tort Law and Social Policy.

"There are a lot of people who would criticize what I do for a living," Clifford says. This was a chance, he says, "to promote an intellectually honest nonpartisan debate about the proper role of tort law in society."

Clifford concedes that "if De Paul had come to me and said, 'We want a million bucks'" in unrestricted funds, he would have said no. "But how about a million to fund special research in your area of practice? That attracted my attention."

Questions of influence and academic freedom are not the only ones this new fund-raising phenomenon raises. As the list of million-dollar donors illustrates, the flow of money is going almost exclusively to the country's most well-established schools. (See "Dean's List," left.)

"The big schools find it easy to raise endowment money and development money, and the smaller schools just struggle," says Chicago personal injury lawyer Clifford . His alma mater, De Paul, is one of only four on the list that are not among the top-tier schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 1996. (The others are Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan., and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.)

The gaps "become stark realities in the quality of the physical plant and the quality of the faculty they attract," Clifford says. "The better schools just keep getting better."