Dean and Wade Edwards
Distinguished Professor of Law
Dear Friends of Carolina Law,
As the holiday season approaches, I’m writing to express the immense gratitude we feel in Chapel Hill for your past generosity. It’s a challenging time for all American law schools and for the legal profession. Yet Carolina Law, your law school, has been blessed immeasurably by alumni support. Amidst the winds of change and dislocation, Carolina Law continues on a steadfast path to retaining its national prominence as a public law school. This is evidenced by the 238 amazingly accomplished first-year law students who enrolled this past August – the same number as the year before – despite a 20 percent decline in applications nationally over the past year. Prospective students are attracted to Chapel Hill, to be sure, by the remarkable strengths of our faculty and talented student body. But they are drawn as well by the increased scholarship aid, bolstered by gifts to the Law Annual Fund, we can offer in a time when tuition – now $22,215 a year for North Carolina residents and $38,846 for non-residents – looms as a near-impossible barrier to many.
Your gifts continue to aid Carolina Law students once they’ve arrived. We have instituted a major summer-grants program that affords meaningful legal experience to rising second- and third-year students who otherwise might find themselves without paid employment. This past summer, more than 75 Carolina Law students found themselves hard at work in public prosecutor and defender positions, federal and state agencies, or Legal Aid offices, thanks to the $3,000 grants we were able to offer them to defray basic summer expenses.
Your gifts also provide extra resources to reward our most talented faculty – a second research assistant on a key textbook, research aid for a crucial project, grants for new “transition-to-practice” courses. These modest financial expressions of support for our finest faculty members – who have labored without State raises for fully four of the past five years – offer a tangible way to convey our appreciation for their bright accomplishments (and this past year, we didn’t lose a single faculty member).
The principal reason Carolina Law continues to do “more than seems possible with less than seems sufficient” (as our dear friend Chancellor Bill Aycock once said), is the friendship and financial support of you, our devoted alumni. The Law Annual Fund – the steady stream of annual support provided by our alumni and friends—contributes to every one of our major priorities. It is your generous and unwavering assistance that allows Carolina Law to strive toward its highest aspiration—to become the finest truly public law school in the nation. I hope you’ll consider a generous gift to Carolina Law this holiday season.
Very best regards,
Dean and Wade Edwards Distinguished Professor of Law
P.S. Thank you for your previous contributions to Carolina Law. I hope that you will consider renewing your support this year. Please help Carolina Law meet its most immediate needs by making a gift to the Law Annual Fund by 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2013, for the 2013 tax year. Gifts made by check must be POSTMARKED by December 31.
-December 3, 2013