Unsung Heroes
from
July/August 2003
by James Burnett and Sasha Issenberg
How do you get to a top law firm so you can practice, practice, practice? It’s not only by attending one of the nationally famous law schools featured elsewhere in this photo gallery. Jeremy Beyda and Chelsea Teachout, standing in the stacks below, are from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City—one of four lesser-known schools that were among the leaders in supplying talent to our top 20 firms last year. The others were the University of Houston Law Center, Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas, and New York City’s Fordham Law School.
Cardozo is known for its Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to help wrongly convicted people and has been replicated at more than 20 universities. Houston is acclaimed for its Health Law Program and Intellectual Property Law Program, SMU for student pro bono work and the largest private law library in the Southwest, and Fordham for three rigorously selective academic centers: the Joseph R. Crowley Program in International Human Rights, the Brendan Moore Advocacy Center, and the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics. At Cardozo, Beyda, who got his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and Teachout, who got hers at the University of Otago in New Zealand, have distinguished themselves on the Law Review. They have job offers from Jones Day and Cravath Swaine & Moore, respectively.
