When Janice Griffith joined the Georgia State University College of Law as its fourth dean, the 1996 Summer Olympics were headed for Atlanta, and the law school was a lonely place. Many of the faculty had scheduled vacations to avoid the downtown crush.

"Everyone told me I should not drive into the law school so I had an elaborate method of getting in," Griffith recalls. "I had to basically run a mile and a half to the Decatur station, in downtown Decatur, and get on the metro line. And at night, I usually didn't run. I usually walked home. And the ironic thing is, everyone was frightened into using [MARTA] so I probably could've driven to the law school very rapidly."

Griffith, who was dean from 1996 to 2004 and has continued as a law professor, will be leaving the College of Law this October to become vice president of academic affairs at Suffolk University in Boston.

Coming to a law school in its formative years - it was established less than 15 years earlier, in 1982 - Griffith saw an opportunity to help build on momentum. She had been a law professor at Quinnipiac University School of Law, in Hamden, Conn., and its successor, Bridgeport University School of Law, since 1982. Throughout much of the 1970s, she worked as an attorney in New York.

"It was a challenge to take a law school, in basically what was its teenage years, and develop it into a leader among law schools," said Griffith. "I was very impressed with the faculty... [and] the students were energetic."

One of her first priorities was bolstering the college's financial footing by securing endowments to supplement state funding. In her time as dean, the college established 19 endowments, with 12 of those being endowed scholarships. The college also established two endowed chairs: the Ben F. Johnson Jr. Chair in Law, held by Julian Juergensmeyer, and the W. Lee Burge Chair in Law and Ethics, held by Clark Cunningham.

The school was also able to increase its annual giving under Griffith, from about $33,000 to more than $200,000 by 2004, and establish class gift and planned giving programs.

Griffith steered the law school toward completing the tasks outlined under its strategic plan, and updated the plan in 2002. And near the end of her time as dean, the school established the Center for Law, Health and Society and the Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth, where she has served as director of local and regional initiatives.

"Janice leaves behind a legacy of leadership as a dean, a builder, a professor, and a scholar," said Dean Steven J. Kaminshine. "The establishment of our two successful centers, the growth of our development program and our endowment, our rise in technology, the increase in our scholarly productivity, and our status among the nation's law schools, all advanced under Janice's leadership," he said.

Griffith also continued to teach while serving as dean, working weekends on research, and authoring a number of articles and book chapters on land use and environmental law. She also wrote about the role of a college dean and the transition between work as a faculty member to that of dean and back again.

"I thought it was important for the dean to set a good example in doing research as well as teaching," Griffith said. "And I found I actually enjoyed the research because it was such a contrast to my administrative work," she said.

Juergensmeyer said Griffith's reputation as one of the country's leading scholars on local government law led to the College of Law's listing by prominent land use scholar and practitioner Robert Freilich as one of the top three programs in the country for students specializing in land use regulation.

Born in Oregon, and having lived and worked mainly in the northeast before coming to Atlanta, Griffith says she will miss the culture of the south and the dynamics of Atlanta. But it is the friends and colleagues she leaves behind she'll miss most.

"I'm going to miss the relationships with people," she said. "I've developed some wonderful [relationships with] colleagues here whom I will miss very much."

Contact: Michael Davis
University Relations
404-413-1361
mdavis6gsu.edu