As dean, Miles collaborated with Nussbaum to create new programs at the Law School. When Tom Ginsburg, the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law, conceived of a program dedicated to bringing faculty and students together for respectful small-group dialogues on diverse ideas and disparate viewpoints, Nussbaum, with Miles’ encouragement, generously endowed this program with proceeds from her receipt of the 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. During Miles’ deanship, Nussbaum also created a new course on animal ethics and law and established the Rachel Nussbaum Animal Law Fellowship, for students interested in that area of the law.

Over the past decade, leaders at some law schools made a regular practice of promulgating official statements on issues of the day. Miles sought to avoid this, instead adhering to the University of Chicago’s policy, developed in the seminal 1967 Kalven Report, that disfavors making official statements in order to foster an environment of free expression for students and faculty. Regarding Miles’s leadership in upholding UChicago’s values of free inquiry and expression, Ginsburg, the faculty director of the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, noted:

“Tom has been absolutely committed to our values as a law school and one of the most important things he has been solid on has been free expression. He’s navigated several crises where various groups in various constituents have asked him to speak out about various things, but he has never compromised ‘Kalven,’ even as so many university leaders around the country have succumbed to the pressures of speaking out on social and political issues.”

Hubbard, who stepped into his role as deputy dean in July 2023, agreed: “Part of Tom’s steadiness as a leader stems from his ability to remain firm on our principles. He has made some very hard calls so that students and faculty can have the academic freedom to take the positions they want, even if they are controversial. And hindsight continues to show us that many of his hard calls were indeed the right calls.”

For Miles, making sure these values are imparted onto students has been an equally important goal.

In recent years, he has increased efforts to communicate the importance of these values to students at all stages of their Law School experience, from the recruitment and admissions stage (where entering students are given copies of The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression), to orientation (where students engage in a free expression workshop), all the way up to graduation, where last year Judge Diane P. Wood delivered a convocation speech on “The Art of Agreeable Disagreement.”

At the heart of these efforts is Miles’s unshakable commitment to the Law School being a place for ideas to freely thrive.

A Supportive Dean, Inspired by Faculty Excellence

One of Miles’s key priorities as dean has been to nurture the engaging intellectual environment of the Law School. In the last ten years, he made more than twelve faculty appointments, deployed six new named professorships, including the first named clinical professorship, and launched a new category of Professor from Practice.

“The Law School is a much stronger place today in large part because of faculty appointments,” said Geoffrey Stone, ’71, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, who, in addition to being one of the Law School’s former deans, had also served as interim before Miles took over. “Tom has been very successful at making appointments; he has probably made more than any dean in recent memory.”

Expanding the faculty has allowed for an influx of ideas on all areas of the law to flourish at the Law School. It allowed teaching responsibilities to be more competitive with other law schools and eliminated a source of faculty turnover.

“The teaching load difference has made a significant impact on the time availabl for faculty to engage with scholarship, engage with one another, and even engage with students,” said Stone. “It has been a very positive change and likely one of the factors to help with faculty recruitment and retention, too.”

Even at the height of the pandemic, the Law School hired six new academic faculty.

Anthony Casey, ’02, the Donald M. Ephraim Professor of Law and Economics, was deputy dean during that time. “One thing Tom has been very good at is making sure we’re recruiting some of the best people while at the same time supporting those people in their scholarly work,” he said. “He’s very good at saying, how can I help you? How can the Law School help you get your ideas out into the world?”

As the faculty grew—reaching a recordbreaking forty academic members at one point, a desired goal for decades—opportunities for faculty to refine ideas and to share them with the wider world also grew.

New academic centers, clinics, and programs also flourished under Miles, creating more opportunities for learning and discourse. In 2016, shortly after Miles became dean, the Law School expanded its flagship law and economics program, launching the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Program in Behavioral Law, Finance, and Economics.

This was followed in 2021 by the establishment of the Constitutiona Law Institute, led by Professor William Baude, and in 2023, the Malyi Center for Legal and Institutional Integrity, led by Ginsburg.

Law and economics is an area that holds particular significance for Miles and the Law School. “We are the birthplace of law and economics,” he said, “It is vitally important for us to continue lead in that field, because law and economics fundamentally changed legal education everywhere and it transformed how lawyers understand about the law.”

Miles also supported Casey in establishing the Center on Law and Finance, which fosters dialogue between academics, practitioners, and students on issues in law and finance.

The center launched in 2020 just as the pandemic struck, but it was nevertheless greatly successful in hosting nearly a dozen virtual events, bringing together leading scholars and practitioners from around the country. Its programming, which quickly moved to in-person convenings, continues to attract growing audiences.

“The center embodies the idea of scholarship engaged with the world because our goal is to create a connection between research and practice,” said Casey, who is the center’s faculty director.

An Advocate for Innovation and Transformative Learning

As the Law School has continued to attract the brightest students, Miles has spearheaded many efforts to improve their experiences and learning opportunities from the very first day. There were two major curricular innovations that completely transformed student learning.

The first was a careful revision of the 1L curriculum, which had not been assessed or updated since the 1970s. The revision retained the Law School’s famed Elements of the Law class and the fundamental common law subjects, but introduced offerings in statutory interpretation, constitutional law, and transactional lawyering. These topics that have grown increasingly important, and hence essential for students to gain exposure to them during their first year. The revision also made 1L class sizes smaller, which further enhanced the student experience.

The second major innovation was the introduction of the JD/MBA accelerated degree program in partnership with Chicago Booth. This innovation built on the continued success of the Doctoroff Business Leadership Program. Not long after, growing strength and excellence in business law inspired students to launch of the Law School’s newest journal, The University of Chicago Business Law Review.

Miles’ deanship has also been a period of significant growth in experiential learning. Three new clinics, including the Jenner & Block Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation Clinic, led by Professor David Strauss, were added.

With a curriculum that combines Chicago’s famous rigor and forward-thinking innovation, students enjoyed superb employment opportunities. The Law School has regularly been at or near the top of lists of law schools with the highest bar passage rates, employment rates, and placements in highly desired jobs. A particular priority was judicial clerkships, and in four of the past five years, the Law School has led the nation in the percentage of new graduates with a federal clerkship as their first job. The number of graduates obtaining clerkships on the US Supreme Court has also risen.

A Steady Hand at the Helm

During the COVID-19 pandemic, places of learning across the country and world were tested in every capacity. The Law School was no different. But for Miles, it was never a question of pausing or shutting down, it was a question of how to continue to do things well, but differently.

“When I came into the deputy dean role in July 2020, I remember thinking, well, we’re just going to be shut down the entire time, but that was definitely not the case,” recalled Casey. “A lot of our peer schools were struggling to stay engaged and connected, but Tom made it his mission to do whatever we could to maintain our culture of engagement with every safety measure in place.”

The task was daunting, but Miles successfully navigated the Law School through the challenges of remote and hybrid learning in a way that did not sacrifice the defining characteristics and values that make UChicago the place that it is. Miles also guided faculty and staff in redesigning classroom infrastructure to accommodate social distance learning in-person.

In the fall of 2020, he made it so that every single student had the option of experiencing at least one class in person. And while other law schools paused or delayed the start of their LLM classes, the Law School went ahead with a reduced-sized cohort. Miles’s commitment to his UChicago values has not gone unnoticed.

Professor Vincent Buccola, ’08, who joined the faculty in 2023, shared that, “I was gratified, like any alumnus would be, to hear from friends that Tom was steering the ship unusually smoothly in very choppy waters. It was only as I began to explore a potential move, though, and so began to look closely at and compare what was going on at peer schools, that I understood fully the importance of Tom’s steady hand and just how rare his kind of composed but determined leadership is in our field. I don’t think it’s even controversial to say that Chicago weathered the pandemic better than any other law school, and Tom is the reason why.”

Returning to Scholarship

As the longest serving dean in a half century (since Phil C. Neal, who served as dean from 1963 to 1975), Miles has successfully elevated the Law School’s prominence as an intellectual leader in legal education and scholarship—and the legacy of his leadership will surely leave a resounding echo on the Law School’s next chapter.

Now, he is eager to return to the place where it all began for him, the field of law and economics. He is also very much looking forward to being back in the classroom.

“I missed being able to teach large enrollment classes as dean,” Miles said. “I look forward to returning to scholarship, too. With a faculty filled with path-breaking scholars, I hope that I can keep up.”