UCLA Dean Schill to be the New Dean of the University of Chicago Law School

It really gives me great pleasure to announce that Michael Schill, a leading scholar in the areas of property, real estate law, and housing policy, who has been Dean of the law school at UCLA since 2004, will succeed Saul Levmore as Dean of the University of Chicago Law School on January 1, 2010.   Before moving to UCLA, Dean Schill taught at NYU and Penn for many years, and is no doubt well-known to thousands of current law students and young lawyers as co-author of the leading casebook on property.

Schill has been, by any measure, a phenomenally successful Dean at UCLA:  recruiting faculty from tenured posts at NYU, Virginia and Chicago; retaining faculty in the face of offers from Harvard, Texas, and Michigan; doubling the number of endowed chairs at the law school, and nearly doubling alumni participation in annual giving.  Only rarely does one encounter a Dean who gets such rave reviews from his faculty.  UCLA has, of course, been one of the nation's top law schools for decades, but Dean Schill will leave the school in probably its strongest and most competitive position ever.  My colleagues and I are fortunate, indeed, that he will take the helm here, and we look forward to welcoming him to Chicago.

And kudos to Eric Posner, Chair of the Dean Search Committee, and my other colleagues on the Committee, as well as President Zimmer and Provost Rosenbaum, for bringing the search to such a successful conclusion! 

The official Chicago press release on Dean Schill's appointment is here.