Fordham Law alumnus Jerry Dickinson ’13 has been appointed dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, effective January 15, following a comprehensive national search.
Born into the Allegheny County foster care system and raised in a large, multiracial foster home of 11 at-risk children, Dickinson has earned a national and international reputation as a constitutional law scholar and civil rights lawyer. His teaching and scholarship have focused on issues around judicial federalism, property law, democracy, and race and the law. His work has been published in leading law reviews and has influenced U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions, amicus briefs by congressional members, and discussions in major national and international media.
Dickinson, whose research focused on land use law during his time at Fordham Law, previously said that his most memorable moment in law school was representing low-income tenants at the Manhattan Housing Court as part of the school’s housing rights clinic. He and a classmate argued and won a motion in February 2012 to dismiss the eviction of a single mother who was on public assistance.
“That was an amazing experience because, while I had been part of a litigation department in South Africa that was doing this kind of work, attorneys were doing the arguing and I was the one researching,” he said in 2013. “Here, I became the student-lawyer, arguing in front of a judge and preparing documents under the supervision of professors.”
Dickinson joined Pitt Law’s faculty in 2017, and he was appointed vice dean in March 2023. Before his academic career, Dickinson practiced at Reed Smith LLP in Pittsburgh, where he founded and coordinated the Housing Rights Project. This pro bono initiative focused on providing legal representation to indigent tenants facing eviction in Allegheny County. He also clerked for Theodore A. McKee, former chief judge of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. As a Fulbright scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dickinson studied comparative constitutional law and housing while representing squatters in eviction cases as a human rights activist.
In 2020 and 2022, he ran for the Democratic nominations in two high-profile elections for Pennsylvania’s 12th and 18th Congressional Districts on platforms involving racial justice, healthcare reform, climate change, gun control, criminal justice reform, and affordable housing.
In addition to his J.D. from Fordham Law, Dickinson earned an LL.M. from the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law in Johannesburg, and an A.B. in political science and sociology from the College of the Holy Cross.
Dickinson joins a number of Fordham Law alumni who have served in leadership roles in legal education. D. Benjamin Barros ’96 was appointed dean of Stetson University College of Law in 2023 after serving as dean at University of Toledo College of Law from 2015 to 2023, and Eric Lane ’70 served as dean of the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University from 2013 to 2016. Mary C. Daly ’72 who, after serving on the Fordham faculty for 20 years, served as dean of St. John’s Law School from 2004 until her untimely death in 2008.
