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Experienced dean will direct ABA Legal Education Section

By Julianne Hill

August 1, 2024, 12:30 am CDT

As a marathon runner, Jennifer L. Rosato Perea is used to both considering the long run and taking things one step at a time.

It’s the mindset she has brought into her new role as managing director for accreditation and legal education at the ABA, which she began June 1.

Rosato Perea had her eye on the ABA job for a while, seeing it as an option after 16 years of service as a law school dean.

“I know the standards intimately well,” she says. “I believe in the standards. I believe in accreditation and how it helps law schools become better.”

Stepping down as dean of DePaul University College of Law, she has begun the ABA job as contentious issues such as academic freedom; accrediting online law schools; and considerations related to diversity, equity and inclusion are on the table. She’s aware of the long road ahead and takes it in stride.

“There’s a lot changing,” she adds. “Just like being a dean, you’re not always going to be liked.”

Finding balance

As an undergraduate at Cornell University, she studied to be a social worker. But an externship at Child Protective Services in her senior year pointed her in a different direction.

“I was learning more about the laws and the courts that impacted the lives of these families, that divided these families, that put these children in foster care and all of the consequences of the system,” she says. “I realized it was law that was the most powerful tool to make change in the lives of families.”

But a serious car accident forced her to defer starting at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She took a gap year, teaching English as a second language in the Ithaca City School District and working in day care centers. “Then I was really ready to go to law school,” she adds.

At Penn Law, she thought litigation “looked fun.” After graduation in 1987, Rosato Perea got a judicial clerkship for Judge Thomas N. O’Neill Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Then, in 1989, she went into private practice at Hangley Connolly Epstein Chicco Foxman & Ewing in Philadelphia as an associate, only to quickly find out that she missed teaching.

“That was going to be the better balance for me, a better fit for me, for my talents and experiences and passion,” says the expert on family law, bioethics and legal ethics.

Professor to dean

Rosato Perea joined Villanova University School of Law as a legal writing teacher in 1990, not knowing if she’d be able to make the leap to full-time faculty. With support from other faculty, she published an article in the University of San Francisco Law Review about the prosecution of faith-healing parents.

“That allowed me to get on the market and to become a professor at Brooklyn Law School,” she says. During her 14 years at Brooklyn, she moved into administration, becoming the associate dean of student affairs.

In 2005, Rosato Perea received a call asking if she’d help Drexel University launch its Thomas R. Kline School of Law. She jumped at the chance to move to Philadelphia, where her husband and daughter were living. She served as acting dean its first year.

“That’s when I really got to know the ABA standards,” she says. “When you’re going to start a school, trying to get provisional approval, you have to really have all your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed, building everything up to the specs of the standards.”

After a full-time dean was named, Rosato Perea became dean of student affairs and stayed until the first class graduated.

But the seeds of desire to become a dean had been planted, and a divorce helped encourage her to leave Philadelphia. In 2009, she found a fresh start as dean at Northern Illinois University College of Law, then joined DePaul six years later.

Listen and learn

At the ABA, Rosato Perea serves as the first woman and Latina in the managing director role.

“I used to call myself a reluctant pioneer,” she says. “I’m a woman, I’m a Latina, I’m a first gen. I always feel pressure being the first. You feel like you’re an example for others that go behind you.”

She plans to dedicate the first six months on the job to “a listen and learn tour” with constituencies—judges, bar associations, young lawyers’ groups and others—to understand their points of view in the accreditation process.

“My role as managing director is partly to keep communication lines open, both in terms of creating standards as well as implementing them,” she adds.

During her transition to the role, she has been in close contact with the most recent managing director, Bill Adams, who retired in June.

“Dean Rosato Perea is the perfect choice for the managing director position,” Adams said in an email to the ABA Journal. “Her extensive experience as a dean at multiple schools gives her the depth of knowledge needed for the position.”

The long run

After beginning her new job, Rosato Perea anticipates her leadership style will shift.

“When you are the dean, you often lead from the front. The managing director is leading either from behind or side-to-side,” she says. “I’m really looking forward to that: to persuade as well as navigate and negotiate.

“Part of the beauty of being in legal education and the legal profession is that we have different ideas, and we are going to hash them out,” she adds. “We’re going to listen to those voices, then come up with, ‘In the ABA context, what are the best standards to provide a quality legal education across the country?’”

Ultimately, however, “I take my lead from the council,” she says.

With her daughter now grown, Rosato Perea and her husband, Juan F. Perea, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, live in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. A side benefit of the new job is that her commute is a half-mile shorter.

“I love the city, and I am thrilled to be able to still run by the lake and the river,” she says, “but I’m excited for the opportunity also to travel to different places as well, as part of the job to meet folks where they are.”

This story was originally published in the August-September 2024 issue of the ABA Journal under the headline: “A New Challenge: Experienced dean will direct ABA Legal Education Section.”