University of St. Thomas Law Journal

A Conversation with Professor Jerry Organ

Trysten Cisney*

“Chance favors those who are prepared.”1

Founding a successful law school in the 21st century requires the right combination of preparation and chance. The same could be said for a successful career in legal academia.

Professor Jerry Organ, a founding faculty member of the University of St. Thomas School of Law, has mastered the right combination. In addition to his contributions to St. Thomas, he’s helped initiate nationwide changes to legal education, including the near elimination of conditional law school scholarships,2 increased focus on law student wellbeing,3 and a rising movement focused on fostering professional identity formation during law school.4

I was fortunate enough to steal a few hours of Organ’s time to ask him about founding the law school, his success with the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Profession, and his views on success.

The Start of St. Thomas

When rumors of St. Thomas began to circulate, Organ was a faculty member at the University of Missouri School of Law.5 Two of his students had successfully advanced from the regional round of a negotiations competition, and Organ found himself accompanying them to the national tournament.6

Whether through fortune or divine intervention, while getting lunch at the competition he overheard a team of students from William Mitchell College of Law discussing a large donation to the University of St. Thomas School of Law:

I thought to myself—last I knew, it was the College of St. Thomas… and, last I knew, they didn’t have a law school…. So I went back to Missouri, I went on the internet (which was much less robust than it is now), and I tried to find the University of St. Thomas School of Law….7

He found a two-page, bare bones website.8 One page had the name of the school, and the second described the mission.9 As basic as it was, it was enough to intrigue Organ. As he put it, “It was pretty clear that this is where God wanted my wife and I to be.”10

Reflecting back, Organ recognizes the move as unconventional:

It was a countercultural thing to do. I was at Missouri, which is a very good flagship state university…. The general trend is that you go to a school higher up in the rankings. You don’t go from a flagship state school to an unaccredited religious institution…. Nobody does that.11

However, he couldn’t escape the idea of what he felt was his calling.12 St. Thomas aligned with what he thought law school should be:

It was a more holistic approach to education, helping students integrate who they are as people of faith and who they’re going to be as lawyers. It was about helping them figure out their purpose. And it was about being a law school that is grounded in the idea of supporting each other as we find where our journey is supposed to take us in supporting others.13

Looking back, the fact that a move to St. Thomas was unconventional is part of what made it so successful:

Everybody who came here in that first group—Lisa and Pat Schiltz, Tom Berg, Neil Hamilton—we were all successful someplace else. We didn’t have to come here. All of us had places we could have gone, and this is where we decided to come, because that mission—that idea of being a whole person and being able to be a scholar, be a teacher of the law, but also be a person of faith and be able to share that with others—was attractive….14

The mission attracted St. Thomas’ founding faculty, but also many of the faculty who came after them. It was and continues to be a shared focus across the institution. It’s the glue that holds the school together and makes St. Thomas successful.

The Holloran Center and Professional Identity Formation:

Organ began his academic journey in environmental law following a successful stint in private practice, but threads of professional development scholarship have existed since he began teaching at the University of Missouri School of Law.15

The University of Missouri had just begun to implement an integrated alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”) curriculum.16 The idea was that all first-year doctrinal courses would intentionally introduce students to ADR, so that the image of a lawyer was not “litigator,” but instead “problem solver.”17 More specifically, Organ and the University wanted to impart the idea that lawyers had multiple tools to choose from to help clients solve problems, not just litigation.18

Organ now recognizes that Missouri’s approach, “was professional identity formation before people talked about it.”19 That vocabulary just didn’t exist in the legal world at that time.20

Whether he knew the vocabulary at the time or not, Organ also contributed to the professional identity formation movement through his property casebook, which introduces practical, skills-based exercises throughout the first-year course:

We were conscious about calling it Property and Lawyering.21 [It] was a response to the MacCrate Report from 1992, which had talked about the need for more instruction in skills and values.22

Organ and his colleagues began writing the book in response to naysayers, who didn’t believe that doctrinal curriculum could effectively integrate the development of skills and values into the 1L classroom.23 He proved them wrong.

So, when Organ received an invitation to join the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Profession following his stint as Associate Dean, it was a natural fit.24

Now, he describes his role as a sort of evangelist for professional identity formation:

We’re casting seeds. They’re not always falling on good soil… but when the seeds do fall on good soil, good things happen.25

One example is the famous Holloran Center Summer Workshops. Shortly into his tenure with the Holloran Center, Organ and Professor Neil Hamilton began hosting workshops where schools could send teams of faculty, staff and administrators to learn about integrating professional identity formation into their curriculum and culture.26

The effect of that was creating a national community. It was a community of people across a few dozen schools who have a shared interest and can support each other. Broadly speaking, we were planting seeds for a national movement that has now taken hold. We have a new ABA standard that requires schools to provide opportunities [for professional identity formation]. I could not have imagined that.27

Through a little chance and a lot of preparation, Organ’s work at the Holloran Center has helped bring together a community of people who care deeply about legal education and initiated change at the highest levels.

Parting words:

When asked about what makes him successful, Organ points primarily to curiosity.

One of the beauties about being a law professor is that you’re paid to be curious. And you’re paid to be curious about things that you want to be curious about.28

One area of curiosity for Organ is data, and he’s found success for himself by following that curiosity when no one else was:

At a time when there were some camps—there were some people who said, “legal education is horrible” and others who said, “legal education is great, everybody should be a lawyer”—I walked a straight line that said: “here is the data, here is what the data tells us.”29

Organ also attributes his success to good timing:

Some of this is just catching the wave at the right time. [It’s about] being interested in something and then having circumstances impel you forward…. A quote I like is “chance favors those who are prepared.” You have to have done some legwork in order to recognize the opportunity to present itself. I have been very fortunate that the places I have done legwork have been places that the opportunity has presented itself.30

While good timing is one piece of the puzzle, you can only catch so many waves by sheer luck. It’s clear that, in addition to having a little chance on his side, Organ has developed a good instinct for following his curiosity and putting in the right legwork.

Conclusion

Two former board members of the St. Thomas Law Journal described the school as a “statistical long shot.”31 After my discussion with Organ, those words ring true.

If it hadn’t been for a chance conversation at a negotiations competition in Dallas, who’s to say where we’d be?

St. Thomas would of course look different, but so would legal education more broadly. Law schools might still be asking their students to battle each other for large conditional scholarships. And while the professional identity formation movement might exist, without the Holloran Center’s summer workshops, it’s difficult to imagine a world where professional identity formation is required as part of ABA accreditation.

We at St. Thomas are grateful that the stars aligned enough to send Organ our way, and for his successful contributions to our school and to legal education more broadly.

* Trysten Cisney, J.D. Candidate, University of St. Thomas School of Law class of 2024, Senior Editor of the University of St. Thomas Law Journal.

  1. AZQuotes, https://www.azquotes.com/quote/591902 (last visited Feb. 1, 2009). ↩︎
  2. See David Segal, Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win, N.Y. Times (April 30, 2011), https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html; Jennifer Smith, Conditional Scholarships: Are They On Their Way Out?, Wall St., J. (July 10, 2013, 5:25 PM ET), https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-45267; Jerome Organ, How Scholarship Programs Impact Students and the Culture of Law School, 61 J. Legal Educ. 173 (2011); Jerome M. Organ, Better Understanding the Scope of Conditional Scholarship Programs Among American Law Schools (Sept. 27, 2013), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2288915; Jerry Organ, Far Fewer Law School Conditional Scholarship Programs In 2016-17 Than In 2011-12, TaxProf Blog (Jan. 2, 2018), https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/01/far-fewer-conditional-scholarship-programs-in-2016-17-than-in-2011-12.html. ↩︎
  3. See Jerome M. Organ, David B. Jaffe, Katherine M. Bender, Ph.D., Suffering in Silence: The Survey of Law Student Well-Being and the Reluctance of Law Students to Seek Help for Substance Use and Mental Health Concerns, 66 J. Legal Educ. 116 (2016); David Jaffe, Katherine M. Bender, Ph.D., Jerome Organ (FN2), “It Is Okay to Not Be Okay”: The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being, 60 U. Louisville L. Rev. 439 (2022). ↩︎
  4. Much of the Holloran Center’s work has culminated in revised ABA accreditation standard 303, which requires all accredited law schools to provide opportunities for professional identity formation in their curriculum. See Brant Skogrand, Holloran Center Efforts Lead to Revised ABA Standard, University of St. Thomas, https://news.stthomas.edu/publication-article/holloran-center-efforts-lead-to-revised-aba-standard/ (Last visited Feb. 1, 2024). See generally, Neil W. Hamilton, Jerome M. Organ, David Grenardo, Louis D. Bilionis, & Barbara Glesner Fines, Standard 303 and the Development of Student Professional Identity: A Framework for the Intentional Exploration of the Profession’s Core Values, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. (Forthcoming, May 2024). ↩︎
  5. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, Co-Dir. of the Holloran Ctr. for Ethical Leadership in the Pro. and Bakken Professor of L., Univ. of St. Thomas Sch. of L. (Jan. 31, 2024) (transcript on file with author). ↩︎
  6. Id. ↩︎
  7. Id. ↩︎
  8. Id. ↩︎
  9. Id. ↩︎
  10. Id. ↩︎
  11. Id.; see generally, Jerome M. Organ, From Those to Whom Much Has Been Given, Much is Expected: Vocation, Catholic Social Teaching, and the Culture of a Catholic Law School, 1 J. Catholic. Soc. Thought 361 (2004). ↩︎
  12. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  13. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  14. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  15. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  16. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  17. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  18. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  19. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  20. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  21. R. Wilson Freyermuth, Jerome M. Organ, & Alice M. Nobile-Allgire, Property and Lawyering (3rd ed. 2011). ↩︎
  22. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  23. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  24. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  25. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  26. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  27. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  28. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  29. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  30. Telephone Interview with Jerome M. Organ, supra note 5. ↩︎
  31. Sean Smallwood & Robert Rohloff, Statistical Long-Shots, Univ. St. Thomas L.J. Blog (Nov. 15, 2022), https://ustlawjournal.com/2022/11/15/statistical-long-shots/ ↩︎

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