By luck or design, Fromer, 37, has made cultural immersion her livelihood. “Staying fresh in copyright law requires me to keep up with contemporary culture. But I like to do that anyhow,” she says. That synergy has become her personal trademark.

Are copyright laws antiquated in an era of streaming videos and downloading music? How does software, an incredibly important but more recent part of the economy, fit into copyright law? Fromer, a rising star in the field of intellectual property law, wrestles with these thorny issues daily. Lecturing in class on the Louboutin lawsuit to prevent Yves Saint Laurent from also selling red-sole shoes, she tackled its key challenge: Is Louboutin’s red sole functional? If so, that would prevent trademark protection under the law’s functionality doctrine.

Fromer is not new to NYU. She was an Alexander Fellow in 2006-07 and a visiting professor in Spring 2012. That fall, she joined NYU Law from Fordham University School of Law, where she began teaching in 2007. One of two scholars to receive the firstever American Law Institute Young Scholars Medal (with Oren Bar-Gill, Evelyn and Harold Meltzer Professor of Law and Economics) in 2011, Fromer has distinguished herself by exploring the unified theories of copyright and patent law, and by using empirical research on creativity and cognition to investigate incentives for innovation.

In “A Psychology of Intellectual Property” (Northwestern University Law Review, 2010), she compares copyright and patent law. The end goal for both is to encourage innovation by protecting creations in their domains, but copyrights for artistic works are easily obtainable and generally last an author’s lifetime plus 70 years, whereas patents for scientific works are difficult to obtain and don’t last as long. She concludes that rather than raise the bar on copyright laws as some scholars have suggested, one might examine, from a psychological point of view, how artistic and scientific creativity compare.

That work led to an investigation of the creative process itself. In “Expressive Incentives in Intellectual Property” (Virginia Law Review, 2012,and also excerpted on page 70), Fromer looked at the literature on creativity for artists and scientists to understand what motivates each. She found that the creator is motivated not only by monetary incentives but also by having his labor and personhood recognized.

“Jeanne is known in the IP community for being someone who connects really big ideas and comes up with creative research agendas,” says Fordham Professor Sonia Katyal. Rochelle Dreyfuss, Pauline Newman Professor of Law, welcomes the computer technology expertise and sharp scholarship that Fromer brings to NYU’s IP group: “She’s a clear, expressive, thoughtful writer with a great eye for an interesting issue.”

Fromer is the oldest of five children and was raised in Brooklyn. Her mom, Susan Abramowitz, is a retired high school math teacher and guidance counselor who still teaches part-time. Her dad, Mark, a New York State economist, is deceased. Fromer went to an all-girls high school, focusing on debate, choir, and mock trial.

From there, she chose Barnard College, majoring in computer science. Graduating at the top of her class in 1996, she went on to MIT for her master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. With fellowships from the National Science Foundation and AT&T Labs, Fromer researched artificial intelligence and built software that was rudimentarily similar to Apple’s personal assistant, Siri.

“I loved computer science, but at some point the day-to-day—becoming mired in encoding an algorithm and finding missing semicolons in debugging code—was less interesting than the big picture,” Fromer says. It didn’t take long to shift gears. At Harvard Law School, “she was revered for her legal brilliance even as a 2L,” says Jeannie Suk, a classmate who now teaches there. Arthur Miller, who left Harvard in 2007 to become a University Professor at NYU Law, remembers Fromer as one of his most exceptional research assistants: “The quality of her work stood out the way few of my researchers have in over half a century.”

After earning her JD in 2002, she joined the intellectual property practice at the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr. Fromer was led to academia by her terms as a law clerk, first with Judge Robert Sack of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then with US Supreme Court Justice David Souter. “Legal research and scholarship lit up more areas of my brain,” she says.

Fromer is married to Arnaud Ajdler, a hedge fund manager who was studying aeronautics at MIT when they met. They have three children: Eric, 10; Olivia, 8; and Audrey, 5. Judge Sack marveled at how she juggled her 2003 clerkship with first motherhood: “She did each job more fully than most human beings, without letting one focus interfere with another,” he says.

In fact, the children only add to Fromer’s cultural synergy. Reading them Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, she says, “I was struck by how much the plot seemed to be driven by trying to keep inventions secret.” Soon enough, Fromer had published a book chapter: “Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.” Sweet.

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“It was a collaboration,” says Schultz. “That’s what I love.” Held at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where they then both taught, the conference resulted in a best practices booklet that was adopted by public defenders statewide.

Schultz is a clinical intellectual property scholar and activist with a focus on patent reform and a passion for technology. He browses websites that fund innovative projects; visits open community labs, where computer and technology folks share ideas; and experiments with technologies such as 3-D printers. “He’s the guy to pass on a really interesting link and also to know about the hip new bar,” says Murphy.

Devoted to ensuring that the world of patents and copyrights is a safe, collaborative space for innovation, Schultz is making an impact. He founded the Patent Busting Project at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital rights group. And as co-director of Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic since 2004, he brought successful lawsuits against “patent trolls”—entities that enforce their patents against alleged infringers often with no intention of manufacturing the product.

He joins the Law School as director of the Technology Law and Policy Clinic, which he began while visiting last year. “Most people think of IP as huge corporations with thousands of patents that they enforce on products. But that’s not what I’m focused on,” says Schultz. Partnering with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, “the clinic focuses on how new technologies benefit society at large and individual citizens, especially those without a lot of resources.”

Clinic student Ava McAlpin ’13 says that Schultz created a comfortable environment for students to experiment in their role as lawyers. Because she co-chaired the Art Law Society, he suggested that the society write a comment on legislation regarding artists’ resale royalty rights, and he helped them organize a star-studded panel discussion with senior people from the US Copyright Office and artist Frank Stella.

Schultz’s scholarship explores the struggle to balance IP law with free expression and access to knowledge and innovation, particularly regarding new digital technologies. He has written extensively about the first-sale doctrine, which permits resale of copyrighted goods without permission of the copyright owner. First-sale issues are rapidly becoming more complex with easy access to Internet resale markets like eBay and Amazon. He is currently co-authoring a paper with Aaron Perzanowski of Wayne State University that investigates what it means to own a digital object “legally.”

Along with Samuelson Clinic Co-Director Jennifer Urban, Schultz invented the Defensive Patent License (DPL), a tool for de-escalating the patent wars. “There are a lot of small companies that are open-source, that publish their code because they want to be based in a community of people who make and share technology.” Patent trolls prey upon them, he says, and none can afford to defend itself. The DPL “offers them a way to band together, to create a circle-the-wagons approach.”

He and Urban laid out their plan in “Protecting Open Innovation: The Defensive Patent License as a New Approach to Patent Threats, Transaction Costs, and Tactical Disarmament” (Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Fall 2012). DPL users pledge to make their patents available to everyone in the DPL network for free and refrain from suing network members for any reason other than defense. “It creates a shield, a collective defense against patent threats that allows them to patent for good,” he says. Even Google has shown an interest in joining the DPL network.

“Jason and Jen’s work on the DPL and similar ideas have catalyzed a conversation in the community about what companies can do themselves to stop the patent madness,” says Colleen Chien of Santa Clara Law. “The impact could be huge.”

Schultz grew up in Berkeley, the younger son of an elementary school teacher, Hilary, and a cardiologist, Clifford. His dad bought him his first computer, an Apple II, when he was in first grade. By middle school, Schultz was programming and chatting in the earliest chat rooms. “It took 25 different steps to get into a chat room,” he recalls. “It was only for the geeks.”

Always interested in other perspectives, he majored in women’s studies at Duke University, opening his world to a range of social justice issues. Schultz earned his bachelor’s degree in 1993, got his JD from Berkeley Law in 2000, and worked at a San Francisco law firm litigating patent and copyright cases for high-tech clients. “Then I got my first dream job,” he says—staff attorney for EFF—and a chance “to change the world.”

A combination of factors lured Schultz to NYU. “It doesn’t interest me to be the only person to do what I do, no matter what spotlight you get. I like to have colleagues,” he says, emphasizing NYU’s strong and diverse IP and clinical faculties. He is also excited by what he sees in the Law School’s passionate students, and New York City’s recent surge in high-tech initiatives.

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From 2011–12, Amazon sold 140,000 digital copies of The Wedding Gift, putting it on the Wall Street Journal’s e-book bestseller list. Within weeks, Bodden found an agent who sold her book to major publishers in the US and worldwide, netting her at least two six-figure contracts. The Wedding Gift will be released by St. Martin’s Press this fall with an enthusiastic blurb by Tom Wolfe.

Bodden’s novel was inspired by an actual 1840s Alabama case in which a slave owner sued his wife for divorce and the court granted him all the property she brought into the marriage, including a young slave woman. Writing on weekends and on vacations, Bodden, who is currently working on a class action in the Southern District of New York concerning the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk police practices, did not even tell her family she was writing a book: “I just thought that no one was going to take it seriously, and this was just something that I was doing for me.”

Now Bodden is working on a historical novel about the conquest of Mexico. Creative writing serves as a refuge from the stress of law practice, she says, and vice versa: “It’s the best of both worlds.”

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After leading a 25-person team on more than 120 missions to defuse bombs, the 28-year-old from Staten Island, New York, was undaunted by the demands of law school, including classes, a staff editorship for the Journal of International Law and Politics, and an assistant teaching position for a Lawyering class. He was, however, frustrated that NYU Law attracted few veterans. In Fall 2012, Marshall shared his concerns with Dean Richard Revesz in an e-mail.

Military veterans, Marshall wrote to the dean, added diversity, maturity, and employability to the student body, but they were largely unable to take on the expense of attending NYU Law. Even though the US Department of Veterans Affairs had a program that matched grants from schools, NYU Law’s $3,500 grant for veterans meant service members needed other funding to cover the bulk of their tuition and living expenses.

Revesz agreed with Marshall, and two weeks later the Law School increased its grants to $20,000, in effect enabling eligible service members to attend NYU Law for free. There is no cap to the number of veterans the Law School will fund. (See also “Portrait of a Dean”)

Ken Kleinrock, associate dean for admissions, says the decision to increase funding was an easy one: “The women and men who have experience in the armed services bring leadership experience and commitment to public service, as well as perspectives and talents that make them an asset to our community.”

In the spring the Law School admitted 15 veterans, up from seven last year. “I am incredibly proud of all that NYU Law has accomplished in their support of veterans,” says Marshall.

On September 11, 2001, Marshall was in his high school American history class when terrorist attacks brought down the twin towers just a few miles north. “I remember thinking I didn’t want to be in the position again of not being able to help,” says Marshall. “The military seemed like the best way to contribute to national security.”

The next year, as his classmates were applying for college, Marshall enlisted in the Navy two days after his 18th birthday. He trained for two years as a member of US Navy Special Operations, then was sent on two deployments, disarming IEDs as well as conventional and unconventional ordnance.

Marshall continues to work on veterans issues. He founded Students for the Education and Representation of Veterans, a group that provides legal representation for veterans in New York. Today more than 40 student advocates help former service members receive fair hearings and apply for discharge classification upgrades that can improve their benefits.

“Looking at how things have changed in a matter of months,” says Marshall, “I can really say that NYU Law has transformed from a school that had a weak relationship with military veterans to one with a welcoming culture for service members both as students and as visitors.”

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Weiler will be on leave for a five-year term as president of the EUI, a doctoral and postdoctoral research institution created by the founding countries of the European Union. The EUI and Weiler are well acquainted. He taught law at the EUI from 1978 to 1985 after earning his PhD there, and later he co-founded its Academy of European Law and a center that is now its Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. “I am humbled yet gratified to return as president to my alma mater at a time of both great challenge and great promise in Europe,” Weiler said in a statement.

Colleagues say Weiler was a natural pick to be the EUI’s next leader. Florence Ellinwood Allen Professor of Law Gráinne de Búrca, a former EUI professor, says, “It’s difficult to think of a more suitably qualified person than Joseph Weiler. In addition to being one of Europe’s leading intellectuals for over three decades, he has quite remarkable institution-building skills and experience.” At NYU Law, de Búrca notes, he established and directed the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice, the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice, and the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization. Weiler was also chair and faculty director of the Hauser Global Law School Program and the JSD Program. “He has the creativity, vision, and energy of several people combined,” de Búrca says.

Weiler’s accomplishments outside the halls of academia have also drawn note and appreciation, including from the pope and the president of Italy. Although Weiler is an Orthodox Jew, in 2011 he won a landmark ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights upholding Italy’s right to display crucifixes in public classrooms. Weiler, who took the case pro bono, explained that it was mostly about the right of European states to chart different approaches to the relationship of church and state—the right of “France to be France and Italy to be Italy,” resisting, as he said in his oral pleadings, a “one rule fits all” solution to this delicate issue.

At the end of January, Pope Benedict XVI honored Weiler with an audience at the Vatican. Later, at a dinner on the same day, at the official residence of Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano, Weiler was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, Italy’s highest civilian honor. He shares the rank with dignitaries from around the world including Prince Philip, Queen Sofía of Spain, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr.

Even as Weiler settles into his new position at the EUI in Florence, he will retain ties to NYU Law, serving on a range of committees related to programs he has overseen. His phone will no doubt continue to ring, but now many of the calls may come from Washington Square.

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Given their differences, the Connelly brothers are somewhat surprised to find their journeys converging at NYU Law. David, 30, who earned degrees in anthropology and international relations at the University of Chicago, was contemplating a PhD and a future as an academic. But after a year teaching English in Madrid, he found himself working for a New York lawyer. The Law School’s strengths in social entrepreneurship ultimately won David over; he worked as a Kiva Fellow in Peru and Colombia just before coming to NYU, where he eventually became a Reynolds Fellow and co-chair of the Law and Social Entrepreneurship Association (LSEA).

Corey, 27, was perhaps the least likely to choose NYU Law, where he is a John J. Creedon Scholar. He studied business and technology with a minor in economics at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, which he attended on full scholarship. As a senior associate at UBS, he led a tax remediation team and worked on bringing the firm’s credit card business inhouse. The more Corey worked with UBS’s in-house counsel, the greater his interest became in the legal aspects of the work.

Meanwhile, Alex, 26, had majored in economics and minored in Latin American studies at Columbia University. After graduation he made tracks for China, where he worked for an educational services company before relocating to Colombia, where he eventually became a Kiva Fellow, like David.

Law school had been in the back of Alex’s mind for a couple of years. “It was probably more of an abstract academic interest,” he says. “Then as I started working and seeing how the law underpinned everything we were doing at all levels, it became more of a practical interest as well.”

The rest of the family, however, had long anticipated Alex’s pursuit of the law. “He likes to argue and is probably the best of us at it,” says David. (Their parents recently found and framed a signed contract Alex had drafted when he was five or six, promising not to cause his siblings harm as long as they adhered to certain stipulations.)

The brothers made the most of their shared year at NYU Law. “The first week,” says Alex, “they both sat me down and said, ‘Here’s what I did, here’s what I didn’t do, here’s what you should do to get the best grades you can.’ A lot of awesome pointers.” Alex accompanied David, who is also something of a world traveler, on an LSEA trip to Sri Lanka during the Fall 2012 semester, followed by a side excursion to India. (The two nearly overlapped abroad back in 2010, when Alex moved to Colombia the day after David left Colombia for New York. The elder brother left his sibling a phone and some leftover cash at the front desk of his hostel.) And over the summer Alex was one of 25 NYU Law students selected to be inaugural Ford Foundation law school fellows; he worked at a human rights organization in Brazil. With both David—now a tax associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell—and Corey—who was a summer associate at Ropes & Gray—planning to remain in the city after graduation, the Connelly brothers will all be New Yorkers at least until Alex graduates.

Their parents, Jan and John, who own a food plant sanitation company in Louisville, visit their sons often. They marvel at the brothers’ work ethic, going back to their sons’ days at an inner-city public magnet school. They intended for the boys to have a stake in their own education, and the three covered each of their NYU Law tuitions. “What they all wanted in their lives was diversity in thought,” says John. “They wanted to go somewhere where they would encounter many different types of people. They all went to institutions where they were able to experience that as undergrads, and we think NYU Law is a great final place for their education in that way.”

Their mother doesn’t deny the boys’ claims that she tried to nudge them toward careers in medicine. But, Jan says now, “At this point in their lives law school seems to fit all three of them. They’re happy, and that’s the most important thing. They just keep giving us reasons to cheer them on.”

On campus, it’s not uncommon to spot at least two Connelly brothers heading to the gym, grabbing a bite, or staking out a study room together. Although the brothers are competitive about sports (they play intramural basketball), grades, and even height (Alex offers, “I think I’m about a quarter-inch taller than both of them”), their shared NYU Law experiences—and, of course, their blood ties—have fostered a certain esprit de corps.

Recently, Corey became engaged to be married. In the ultimate gesture of brotherly unity, he asked both David and Alex to be his best men.

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Following this mantra has served the indefatigable lawyer—she holds not one, but three public interest jobs—very well. Recently named to Forbes’ “30 under 30: Law & Policy” list, Burke has won every case either in court or on appeal—with one pending. But even more impressive is her track record of creating innovative, holistic legal service programs in every organization where she has worked. The founder and executive director of Atlas: Developing Immigrant Youth (Atlas DIY), a cooperative empowerment center for young immigrants and their allies, Burke also serves as the in-house attorney for the New York Asian Women’s Center (NYAWC), where she built the pro bono legal services program from the ground up. She also teaches Brooklyn Law School’s Immigration Youth Law Clinic, which she developed herself.

Burke first earned her chops at the Door, an organization that provides youth development services. She interned there as a law student, then served there as a Skadden Fellow for two years after graduation. During her fellowship, Burke created a peer mentorship program for young Chinese immigrants who were victims of human trafficking. “Lauren’s energy far surpasses that of most human beings,” says Jason Cade, a lawyering professor at NYU Law who was Burke’s supervising attorney when she interned at the Door. “She was mature enough, sophisticated enough, and caring enough that even as an intern, she understood that social determinants are just as critical for a client’s success as actually doing the legal work.”

Burke’s fluency in Mandarin and her experience working with trafficking victims at the Door made her a perfect fit to develop the pro bono program at NYAWC, which now represents more than 100 clients, primarily women, who are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. “I’ve learned so much from Lauren about how to interact with clients and develop client relationships, which is hugely important because the legal work we do involves discussing very traumatic experiences and very personal things,” says Colleen Duffy ’11, an NYAWC attorney who reports to Burke.

These days, Burke’s remarkable energy is largely focused on Atlas DIY, the center for immigrant youth that she founded in January 2012. (The children in the family stranded by Sandy were Atlas DIY participants.) Both she and the center have been particularly active since the Obama administration implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows undocumented individuals who arrived in the US before age 16 to defer prosecutorial removal action. By the end of 2012, Atlas DIY had won two DACA cases and filed close to 60 more.

Drawing on what she learned about holistic legal service at NYAWC and the Door, Burke’s goal for Atlas DIY is not only to provide legal assistance for undocumented immigrant youth but also to create a place that enables young people to become active agents of change. Burke staged her first protest at the age of nine, she recalls, fighting her parents for the right to cut her hair. Twenty years later, she has moved on to bigger issues of social justice, but she wants to ensure that every young person has the confidence to act on his or her own behalf. “I want the young people to decide what happens at our organization,” Burke says. “I want them to be the ones who have the power.”

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New members of congress often arrive in Washington agape at the scale of the nation’s problems, starting with the upward-spiraling federal debt and endless cycle of congressional budget battles.

First-term Democratic US Representative Scott Peters ’84, however, is no stranger to acrimonious fights over spending and the size of government. As president of the San Diego City Council, Peters saw his adopted hometown engulfed in a fiscal crisis when the public pension system ended up more than a billion dollars in the red.

The budget meltdown drove a mayor out of office, set off years of combat between elected officials and a zealous city prosecutor, and triggered a federal investigation of San Diego’s bond offerings. Peters and his council colleagues were ultimately exonerated in an inquiry—but not spared the task of turning around San Diego’s finances.

Backed by Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders, that’s what the Peters-led city council did, pushing public employees to accept new pension agreements, cutting spending, and eventually putting San Diego in a position to spend again on infrastructure and community development.

It’s probably an experience Peters would prefer to put behind him. During his 2012 campaign, however, he endured withering attacks for his voting record on the city budget. Peters ultimately defeated his opponent, Republican incumbent Brian Bilbray, by 2.5 percentage points—around 7,000 votes—after spending nearly $3 million in personal and family money.

For better or worse, all that may have been the perfect preparation for serving in the 113th Congress.

“We learned some good lessons in San Diego,” Peters says, reflecting on the pension battles. “What we found was that people didn’t like to hear bad news, but they understood if you told them the truth and you gave them a plan for how to deal with it, that over time we could adapt.”

He adds: “I have tremendous confidence that if we were willing to talk with voters about really how to save Medicare and make sure that it’s there for people who depend on it, and Social Security, that we could.”

Peters obviously didn’t get into politics by being bent on slashing away at government. The son of a Lutheran minister, he worked at the Environmental Protection Agency after graduating from Duke University and found himself drawn to NYU School of Law because of its commitment to the public interest.

Students there were “thinking about how to use the law to change things,” Peters says. For himself, Peters hoped to effect change on issues related to the environment and public development.

After a stop at the white-shoe Minneapolis firm Dorsey & Whitney, Peters and his wife, Lynn, landed on the West Coast. There, he began to build a reputation in the San Diego community—first in private practice, then as a deputy county counsel who litigated high-profile disputes over a controversial waste-disposal facility in San Marcos, a suburb of San Diego.

Colleagues who worked with Peters at the firm Baker & McKenzie and for the county describe him as an earnest, good-humored attorney determined to find areas of compromise.

Republican real estate developer Fred Maas met Peters when the latter was serving as a pro bono attorney for the Sierra Club in the mid-1990s. Maas was seeking support from the environmental group for a development project and walked away impressed by Peters’s skill and fair-mindedness as a negotiating partner.

“He’s exactly the kind of guy who should go to Washington,” says Maas, who crossed party lines to support Peters for Congress. “He was always the guy who could broker things among warring factions.”

San Diego attorney Pamela Naughton, who worked with Peters in private practice, echoes that description, saying he “always found the bright side, the humor in everything.” That wasn’t always easy during Peters’s time as a city official. “Those were very, very difficult times for the city of San Diego,” Naughton says. “He was under a lot of pressure, and he performed just marvelously.”

If deficits and debt are at the top of the congressional agenda—just as they were for the San Diego City Council—they’re not the only issues Peters hopes to tackle. He won seats on the House Armed Services and Science, Space, and Technology committees, overseeing areas of importance to his local economy.

That, after all, is why he says he ran for federal office, trading a sun-soaked life in California for a cross-country commuter job, representing a district he’ll have to fight hard to defend.

“We love our surfers and we love our admirals, but [San Diego] is an adolescent city. It’s developing into what it’s going to be,” says Peters. He also sees similarities between the national legislature and the local city council on which he served.

“You have a bunch of people who have their values, their insecurities, their egos. You have to sort that all out in figuring out how you’re going to work with them. The obvious challenge here is that here there aren’t nine of them—there are 435,” he says. “There’s a tremendous sense that everyone heard the same thing from the voters, which is, ‘Go solve problems and stop bickering.’”

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Levin, a partner at Davis Polk from 1989 to 2010 and currently senior counsel at the firm, is at full throttle in a second career as an early-childhood and elementary school teacher at PS 343. A native New Yorker who attended private schools and, with his wife, raised two sons who also attended private schools, Levin changed careers partly because he wanted to “know what options were available to children who don’t have the resources that my children had” and to “investigate” the political debate surrounding public education by gaining practical teaching experience.

“For many of the people who first created public schools 180 years ago, universal free public education was the key to a successful democratic society,” Levin says. “If they were right, what happens to that society if public education is failing?”

That kind of thoughtfulness and commitment, not to mention his successful legal career, makes Levin an attractive hire in public education. “It’s exciting to have him here,” Principal Maggie Siena says, calling Levin “a consummate professional.” Siena worked with Levin at PS 150 in Tribeca, where she was principal and he worked as an assistant fourth- and fifth-grade teacher. When she was tapped to open PS 343 in the renovated courthouse last fall, she invited him to join her. “The kids respond well to him,” she says, “and he has a very good sense of who they are.”

For Levin’s kindergarteners, the afternoon activity is building with blue foam blocks, some as big as the children. With their teacher’s help, the kids plan what kinds of structures they want to build and choose teams, then the room erupts in noisy activity. Soon, where there were just blocks sit pony castles and jungles.

Although it looks spontaneous, the activity is carefully designed—drawing on a graduate course at Bank Street College, where Levin recently earned joint master’s degrees in early-childhood and elementary education. “Play is a very important way for the kids to learn,” Levin explains. “The blocks can teach the kids a host of things, such as counting or science—how many blocks does it take to build a structure? How are you going to keep up the blocks?”

Restructuring blocks is a far cry from restructuring debt for titans like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. As a partner in Davis Polk’s Credit Group, Levin advised clients on complex financial problems including the collapses of “lots of things that were not supposed to collapse,” in his words, such as Argentina, Bear Stearns, Bethlehem Steel, Enron, and many more.

At the firm, his “legendary encyclopedic knowledge of law,” says partner Jason Kyrwood, was coupled with a genuine interest in the well-being of young associates: “If you had a personal or professional issue, he would take the time to talk it over and offer frank, useful advice.”

Teaching as a second career has long been Levin’s plan. “I knew when I was in fourth or fifth grade that I wanted to teach, but only after I’d done a lot of other things,” he says. His teachers “brought the world into the classroom.” A Spanish teacher served in the Spanish merchant marine, and an English teacher was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a senior in high school, Levin helped teach ninth-grade English. Levin chose NYU Law because so many of its professors had real-world experience. He remembers Professor John Slain ’55 as a “perfect example of someone who had done a lot of other things,” including practicing law at a firm, serving as general counsel of a public company, and in 1980 co-authoring a seminal law book, Agency, Partnership, and Employment: A Transactional Approach.

Levin’s pro bono work often has an educational slant. He has done work for the Lincoln Center Institute, which provides curricula for schools. Recently, he joined the board of School Year Abroad, of which one of his sons and three nieces are alumni.

For Anna Hayes Levin ’80, who met her spouse when both were undergraduates at Yale, his gear switching makes complete sense. After her own career as general counsel for LVMH and a partner at the Battle Fowler law firm, she left to serve on Manhattan Community Board No. 4 from 2001 to 2009 and now sits on the New York City Planning Commission. “It’s always been important for us to do something for our community,” she says. “Besides, changing careers is intellectually rejuvenating. As a friend once said, every plant needs to be repotted.”

For Peter Levin, there is also the immense satisfaction of positively influencing a young life. “There are children who arrive with a range of emotional situations,” he says. “When you’ve succeeded, you see the light go on. They radiate back to you how well you’ve done.”

He adds: “Most of them don’t have a clue what I did before. And to them it doesn’t really matter.” Or, as one kindergartener put it, “Peter’s awesome.” Eyes widening, he leans forward and whispers, “He lets us dissect fish.”

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“Attending the clinic and having Alina as my professor has been the best decision I’ve made during my law school career…. Alina’s work embodies the goals of clinical teaching: equipping law students with the ability to address urgent problems and preparing them to serve as effective practitioners,” wrote Jesse Rockoff ’14 on behalf of a group of Immigrant Rights Clinic students who nominated Das for the award. “Despite her busy schedule, Alina never fails to serve as a friend and mentor, demonstrating the spirit of inclusion and community building on a day-to-day basis.”

Das’s scholarly work and the work of the clinic have attracted the attention of the Supreme Court, too. In Moncrieffe v. Holder, the Court ruled in April that a noncitizen should not be automatically deported for “social sharing of a small amount of marijuana.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s majority opinion cites not only Das’s 2011 article, “The Immigration Penalties of Criminal Convictions: Resurrecting Categorical Analysis in Immigration Law,” but also an amicus brief written by Das and clinic students Pierce Suen ’13 and Jordan Wells ’13 on behalf of more than 80 immigration law professors. The brief argued that labeling non-citizens as aggravated felons when they are caught with small amounts of marijuana “deprives immigration adjudicators of the power to consider favorable equities, humanitarian concerns, and the public interest.”

This year, too, Das is the recipient of the Daniel Levy Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Immigration Law, given by LexisNexis Matthew Bender. Das and Nancy Morawetz ’81 were also honored for their leadership of the Immigrant Rights Clinic in the New York Law Journal’s 2012 list of “Lawyers Who Lead by Example.”

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