It’s not every day that you hear an attorney — let alone the dean of one of the nation’s top law schools — invoke the name of G-d, and a former Colorado governor, when he explains how he has approached his job.
Phil Weiser, who for the past four years plus has captained the University of Colorado’s Law School in Boulder, does precisely that.
He starts with former Governor Roy Romer, an alumnus of CU Law himself, who once said, “All truth is partial,” when describing the philosophy that guided him as the state’s top executive.
Those four words impressed Weiser mightily.
“One of the things that I’ve reflected on is the extent to which different people see different parts of the truth,” he says. “It is really interesting to be in a leadership situation that calls on you to exercise great empathy to understand the truth from all these different perspectives.
“To be an effective leader of any institution, like a law school, you have different constituencies — the faculty, staff, students, alums, the central administration. One of the hard parts of the job, which has tested me and enabled me to grow, is the fact that all these relationships, all of which are crucial, require you to reflect on and understand this concept that all truth is partial.”
The phrase is, at its core, anti-ideological, defying the notion that truth can be neatly labeled and boxed in a single set of beliefs.
“It’s also very Talmudic,” says Weiser, who as an observant and open-minded Jew very frequently looks to that body of knowledge, as well as the Torah, for professional and personal guidance.
“In the Talmud there’s a great quote in which one rabbi says you can do it, another says you can’t, one says this way, another says that way. But all this comes from the same G-d.
“So there may be ideology that G-d can fully grasp but we humans have to be humble. The lesson is humility.
“For me this leadership situation has been a chance to develop greater humility and perspective.”
While humility is one of the traits Weiser evinced in his recent interview with the Intermountain Jewish News, several others also reared their heads — intellectual formidability, energetic personal confidence and a certain measure of fearlessness, among others.
If any or all of those seem incompatible with humility, then you’re starting to get a picture of Weiser, a man who, on paper, might seem somewhat paradoxical but, in person, seems unusually well-integrated.
The New York native first joined CU Law in 1999 after having served as senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in the US Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, and having clerked for US Supreme Court justices Byron White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In addition to teaching law at CU, Weiser is the founder and executive director of the university’s Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship, capitalizing on an expertise in telecom law he acquired in the course of his career and which remains one of his academic specialties.
At the Justice Dept., Weiser worked for Joel Klein, the noted lawyer-educator who ran the Antitrust Division. Klein assigned him to work on telecom and technology-related cases, which encouraged Weiser to gravitate toward academia instead of the courtroom, his original objective.
“My plan had been to go into the courtroom where I could do more policy-related work. I thought I could become an assistant US attorney in New York, where I was from, and would try cases, then join a litigation firm in New York. That had been my basic plan, but my excitement in technology law, coupled with the opportunity to try it in Colorado, was a detour.”
He smiles, slightly ironically.
“I’ve been taking that detour ever since.”
Weiser, 47, was named dean of the law school nearly five years ago. Asked how such a relatively young man could rise to such a lofty post, he replies by deconstructing a myth about deans in the modern age.
“It is a young person’s job these days,” he says without hesitation. “It used to be, 20 years ago, being a dean was an easy way to finish one’s career, as a capstone, with a distinguished set of responsibilities. Today, you’re leading an enterprise that is under pressure from lots of quarters.”
He points out that there has been a 40% decline in law school applications over the last five years, that law firms are hiring considerably fewer entry level lawyers, that declining revenues are increasingly pinching law school budgets.
“These existential challenges — on admissions, on employment, on curricula — require someone who’s able to be all-in to the job,” says Weiser, “which is generally going to be someone younger, not somebody who’s at the end of their career. You need stamina for this job.”
A dean has to be a scholar, a teacher, a fundraiser and a politician. He or she has to maintain effective contact with constituencies related to all those disciplines.
Weiser says he’s lucky to share dinner with his wife and two children three nights a week, and even when he does, he goes back to work after dinner, often past 11 o’clock. Weekends are very often consumed by his professional responsibilities.
All of which is why, come next July, Weiser will resign as law school dean and go back to work as a law professor at CU in addition to several other academic responsibilities.
“It’s a job that requires me to be all-in, which is why, after five years, I’m transitioning and handing the baton to someone else,” he says.
“When I started I said to myself and my family, ‘Let’s see if I can get this job under control,’ meaning that it wouldn’t be quite so all-encompassing. When I said that I lacked humility. I thought I would be able to find ways to protect my time, to be efficient.
“What I realized is that we’re at a very difficult time for law school, so any leader of a law school is going to have a hard time not being all-in, if they care about being successful. And it’s certainly not in my personality to drift.”
He adds that he is eager to get back to what he loves, and does, best.
“Teaching,” Weiser says, “is the best job in the world.”
Looking back on the nearly half-decade he spent as dean, Weiser says he feels good to have been part of a “team effort” that significantly improved things at the law school.
“The data points for Colorado Law,” he says, “are very favorable.”
In its most recent enrollment, CU Law recruited its largest incoming class ever, at 204. The school had never before exceeded the 190s, Weiser says.
The school’s “yield rate” — those students who accept the school’s offers — went from 15 to 19% in one year. Entry standards are in the process of being raised, and class sizes being reduced, while admissions — which are falling at many law schools — are holding steady.
“I feel that on the fronts of recruiting students and helping them with their careers, we’re doing what needs doing,” Weiser says. “On the financial side, we’ve not increased tuition for four years in a row and we’ve doubled scholarships from the year before.”
While those numbers are impressive, and while Weiser is proud of them, he knows that there is much more to running a successful and effective law school.
“We’re being asked to do more and we have to do more,” he says.
“Twenty-five years ago if you graduated a student who could think like a lawyer and knew the basic tools of the trade, that was probably enough. They could learn the rest on the job. Now we have much more pressure to do more, including the ethical and professional skills.”
Weiser has been a leading force in several CU programs designed to sharpen fledgling lawyers’ ethical knowledge and entrepreneurial skills, not only in the context of working in the competitive business environment but in being entrepreneurial in managing their own careers.
“You have to be flexible,” he says. “We’re in a world where the cycles of change are faster so you have to be able to make changes with them.”
Weiser also emphasizes that earning a law degree doesn’t necessarily mean that students must pursue a legal career.
“There’s a rich variety of career paths for people trained in the law. What do you need in your portfolio? How do you build a network of people who are helping you in being an entrepreneur yourself?”
He can recite a litany of successful people — in healthcare management and representation, in government, in business — who started their careers by studying law.
A law degree, Weiser says, provides a student with “critical thinking like a lawyer” as well as such “practicable legal skills” as contract and business negotiation, creative problem solving and effective teamwork.
“Lawyers know how to get things done,” Weiser says. “When you are working with people from different disciplines, it’s amazing how often lawyers are the leaders who drive toward the solution.”
As a soon-to-be-former dean and as a professor, Weiser has nothing but confidence in the young people to whom he’s offering such advice. The attorneys of tomorrow, he predicts, are going to be very good ones.
“I love today’s students. They’ve got more grit. They are extremely thoughtful, enthusiastic and have no sense of entitlement. They have more of an orientation toward serving others. Being their teacher is just a blast.”
In his own Generation X, he says, many of his fellow law students were interested in little more than “getting a six-figure job,” ideally with powerful corporations or law firms.
Weiser says that he never felt himself on the same wavelength as those contemporaries.
“I have been an aberration from my peers at every step of the way. When I went to law school at NYU and came out to Colorado and worked in the public sector, I did something very unlike my compatriots at the time who were working in Wall Street firms.
“It wasn’t that I am averse to making money, it was that I was following my intrinsic desire to do something I found intellectually interesting and meaningful.”
Three questions — “is it meaningful, is it intellectually interesting, am I working with good people?” — have been Weiser’s personal and professional beacons.
“That’s how I have viewed my life, and I think that’s very true of today’s generation. That’s how they look at the world. They want to do something meaningful, they want to be engaged and they want to be with good people.”
Ethics, Weiser says, is far from an abstract concept for him. As a teacher, he hopes to impart in his students the same respect for ethical conduct, no matter what branch of law or other profession they ultimately pursue.
“Being ethical, in my view, is not at tension with being effective or making money. If Volkswagen had been a more ethical company, they’d be much more profitable right now.”
Although Weiser often answers simple questions with complex answers, he corrects his interviewer when asked whether he considers himself a philosophical person.
“I’m not a philosopher,” he says. “I am a student of Torah wisdom and I try to bring those principles to my students and to my life.”
His parents both come from “deep Jewish traditions,” he says. Both his father, from Montreal, and his mother, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who was born in a concentration camp, were observant Jews.
“For me, the Jewish tradition is very personal,” Weiser says, “and it always resonated with me. It continues to resonate with me. Raising my kids in that tradition generates new meaning and insights.”
Weiser sends his children, Aviva and Sammy, to Denver Jewish Day School and he attends services at Denver’s Kohelet congregation. He describes himself in religious terms as “traditional and egalitarian.”
He feels that his Jewishness and his career in legal scholarship form a perfect nexus.
“We Jews are called the people of the book for a very good reason,” he says. “We have a set of books, the Torah and the Talmud, and other writings that are in the legal tradition. That tradition was developed by Jews in a powerful, powerful way. The tradition is one of argument for the sake of heaven.
“If you go to the Supreme Court and listen to an oral argument about an important constitutional law issue, an issue around the First Amendment, for example, you hear something that is elevated.”
Once, while he was living in Washington and clerking in the Supreme Court, Weiser brought his Talmud teacher, a chasidic rabbi, to listen to an argument in the nation’s highest court.
“He said, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much our tradition,’” he says of his teacher’s reaction.
Even though one of his mentors, Justice Ginsburg, is non-observant in terms of religious Judaism, “she is of this tradition,” Weiser says. She once told him that her favorite phrase from Torah is “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”
He does not consider it a coincidence that there are three Jews on the US Supreme Court.
Basic human rights — a cornerstone both of English law and the US Constitution — were articulated in the Torah, Weiser points out, citing Abraham arguing with G-d on behalf of the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah and Moses defending the right of women to inherit their father’s property.
However, while openly proud of the Jewish role in advancing Western civilization, Weiser is too much an egalitarian to cop any sense of Jewish superiority.
“The richness of our tradition and the commitment to text-based study is one we happen to have adhered to for thousands of years in a unique way. That is part of the secret of the Jewish people, and it’s a pretty special legacy to be a part of.”
Weiser and his wife Heidi Wald reside in Denver but he says that he has a special place in his heart for Boulder, the city in which he has been working for years and in which he plans to continue his calling in the future.
“The Boulder community in general, which includes the Boulder Jewish community, has this spirit of give before you get,” he says. “The collaborative spirit of people helping each other is an extraordinary asset that helps all of us be better.
“In Colorado, and in Boulder in particular, if somebody succeeds, that’s a win for all of us. For law students in Boulder, being part of that collaborative environment is a tremendous boost to their success. People in Boulder help each other out.”
Weiser, who says he has lots of contacts with Boulder Jews and values them, is very impressed by the achievements of the Boulder Jewish Community Center and the business career-oriented youth camp, Camp Inc, with which he is active and in which he hopes to enroll his own children one day.
“The Boulder Jewish community, like Boulder itself, has these very interesting traits of being highly entrepreneurial,” says this entrepreneurial lawyer. “They are very spiritual and really welcoming of one another. There’s great leadership.”
Boulder Jews, like Boulderites in general, can be sometimes eccentric, Weiser concedes, but he doesn’t have a problem with that.
“Eccentrics are in the eye of the beholder,” he says. “What I think is that people like Steve Jobs, who think different, add a lot. I’ve learned a lot from being around interesting people and Jews in Boulder.”
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com.