Susan Westerberg Prager Named Sixth Executive Director of AALS

Former Dean of University of California-Los Angeles School of Law to Lead
Organization As It Enters Its 109th Year As the Representative of America's
Law Schools

WASHINGTON, March 31 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Former UCLA Law School Dean
Susan Westerberg Prager has been named Executive Director and CEO of the
Association of American Law Schools (AALS), the nation's principal
representative of America's law schools and the scholarly society of the law
teaching profession. Her appointment, effective September 1, 2008, was
announced by AALS President John Garvey following a unanimous vote of the AALS
Executive Committee. Garvey is Dean of the Boston College Law School.

Prager will become the sixth Executive Director of the AALS since its founding
in 1900. The AALS created the Executive Director role in 1963. Prager will
succeed Carl Monk, who last year announced plans to resign after sixteen years
as AALS Executive Director.

"I am delighted that Susan has agreed to commit her extraordinary talents to
directing the Association," Garvey said. "She has an unparalleled
understanding of legal education from 16 years' service as dean at UCLA. She
has served the Association as its President and as a member of the Executive
Committee, and knows its potential as well as anyone. She is also a woman of
keen intellect, great judgment, and wonderful personal skills. I must add
that Carl Monk's service for 16 years has helped build the Association into
the kind of organization that deserves a leader of such high quality."

Prager noted that she was "attracted to the Executive Director role by the
vibrancy of the AALS and its programs, by the opportunity to work with
dedicated faculty from many law schools, and by the opportunity to help the
AALS advance its core values, which include encouraging research and
scholarship about law and legal institutions, furthering excellent teaching,
striving for a diverse faculty, student body and profession, encouraging
public service in the legal profession, and fostering justice. The AALS has
an important role to play in the shape and content of national higher
education policy," Prager said.

Prager added that she is "honored to have been recruited to this role at a
time when U.S. law schools are working to ensure the vitality of democratic
values like fundamental fairness in an increasingly integrated global economy.
The search for justice is central to the law teaching profession, and I am
eager to work with the faculty and deans of AALS member schools to ensure that
the Association's standards and its professional development programs for law
teachers are responsive to rapidly developing national and global events.
I'm also eager to encourage the next generations of law professors to
contribute to the work of the Association, which depends in critical ways on
volunteer efforts from the faculty and administration of member schools."

AALS Executive Director Carl Monk said, "The AALS is very fortunate to have
recruited someone with Susan Prager's background and expertise to serve as
Executive Director. I have known Susan for more than twenty years; she is a
seasoned higher education administrator with superb judgment and commitment.
She will be a strong, clear voice for the nation's law schools, and will move
the AALS to an even stronger, more influential role in assisting the nation's
law schools in educating the next generations of lawyers."

Prager credited Monk with leading the effort to significantly expand and
improve the Association's professional development programs for law teachers,
and for devoting himself to furthering collaboration with the law teaching
profession all over the world by his painstaking work to develop the new
International Association of Law Schools.

The search for Monk's successor was chaired by former Georgetown Law School
Dean, Judith Areen, Paul Regis Dean Professor of Law at Georgetown and 2006
President of the AALS. Areen said: "We are delighted that Susan Prager will
be the next Executive Director of the AALS. Susan is a respected and
effective leader in legal education whose energy, wisdom and ability to build
consensus make her exactly the right person to guide the AALS. This is a
great moment for the AALS and for all of legal education."

Professor Prager is a graduate of Stanford University and the UCLA School of
Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the UCLA Law Review. She joined
the UCLA faculty in 1972, became Dean a decade later, and served as dean from
1982-1998 - the longest tenure of any dean in UCLA law school history. At the
time Prager became Dean she was one of two female law Deans in the country.
Prager was a trustee of Stanford University for 14 years. She chaired the
board's Academic Policy Committee and was a Vice President of the Board. She
left UCLA in 1999 to become Provost at Dartmouth College, and recently was
President of Occidental College in Los Angeles. Prager is a longtime Director
of the Pacific Mutual Holding Company, which owns Pacific Life Insurance
Company. Over the years she has been engaged in the national legal education
community in a wide variety of ways, serving as AALS President in 1986. She
is Professor of History at Occidental College and the Arjay and Frances
Fearing Miller Professor of Law Emeritus at UCLA. Her research has focused on
marital property law, and on California legal history.

SOURCE Association of American Law Schools

Carl C. Monk of AALS, +1-202-296-8851, cmonk@aals.org